Under Another Argead Sun

So where are you going to? I don’t mind.
If I live too long I’m afraid I’ll die.
So I will follow you wherever you go,
If your offered hand is still open to me.
Strangers on this road we are on,
We are not two, we are one.
—The Kinks

The Greeks insist on calling their northern neighbor the Former Yugoslavia Republic of Macedonia, or Fyrom, coveting the geographic name of their own province, the birthplace of Alexander the Great and a Byzantine fatherland.1 So jealous are they that they barred the Fyromites from entering NATO or the European Union, and from using the old sixteen-pointed star of the Argead Royal House on their national flag, which instead flies an Oriental sun with eight rays. To the east, the Bulgarians call the people here Bulgarians with accents; to the north, Serbia refers to this hilly land as Southern Serbia and refuses to recognize her Orthodox church; but the Macedonians, a poor but proud lot, erect statues of Alexander and refer to their country by the heroic name they prefer.

The train to Skopje was an old one with cabins of six seats, packed with Macedonians, or with Serbs on their way further north to the Exit Festival in Novi Sad, which attracts the same zealous pilgrims as Coachella. The track left the drained marshes of the south, ragged with grassy thickets, for the dry, yellowed plains in Northern Macedonia, and followed the muddy River Axios, bloated by unseasonable rain, until it crossed the border and became the Vardar, driving under and between curdled marble crags among the wooded Paionian hills.

I arrived in the Escape From New York-themed train station, under a steel quilt of cloud that reminded me of my dreary home after the bright skies of the Aegean. I had thought coming in that the city looked green, but it was really just overgrown, most of it run-down and ill-cared for, the Soviet architecture made to emphasize the sameness of the oppressed. In the center, the Macedonians tore down these monuments to evened ambition, and erected a few European blocks around cobblestone streets and squares. A stone footbridge crossed the Vardar into the narrow alleys of the Albanian quarter under the walls of the Citadel, and beyond that was a busy Turkish market.

I stayed in the Hostel-Hostel, one of the small, family-owned lodgings where everyone knows each other, and where a strange community would have developed if Skopje had more magnetism to keep impetuous travelers occupied. Every morning until noon they put out a huge breakfast—bread and butter and jam, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, loaves of feta cheese, hard-boiled eggs, coffee and tea—and every night at 6 served vegetable soup from a big stock pot. Outside the brightly-painted single story stood two tents on platforms carpeted with Astroturf worn bald, with walls of hung tarps that opened onto the dirty yard like the reception tents of some hippie Sheikh of Araby. They held couches and cushioned lawn chairs around wood tables splattered with paint, under the faceted spheres of disco lamps.

There I sat with three Brits, a long-haired German on his state-mandated service excursion, a pretty Dutch girl, and a worldly young couple: Joanna from Slovakia, and Etienne, a Frenchman from the Pyrenees, born in a pair of skis, who was learning Slovak so they could share some language other than English, which was unsuitable for sharing secrets. We played Uno with some strange new rule added each round by the German until no one could remember them all, but we had to rely on a collective prosecution, the law parceled among eight judges and colored toward a lengthy trial by self-interest.

A while after the increasingly polemic game ended, two Bulgarians stumbled into the yard from the Carlos Santana concert, held concurrently with the Patti Smith one, and sat down among the four remnants of Uno, to argue over a nearly depleted bottle of Famous Grouse.

“Please man, give me some,” begged the skinny Bulgar.

The fat one remarked casually, “It’s very soft, I don’t like soft whisky.”

“So don’t drink it—please!”

Their names were Ocho and Kamon. They were both vegetarians and martial artists, and both had their long hair in ponytails, but lanky Ocho played the guitar and fat Kamon the flute.

“Our instruments are like women,” said Ocho. “We need to take them everywhere.”

Kamon lit a cigarette. “I quit smoking five years ago, but today is special day. It is Santana Day.”

“If I were woman, I would fuck Santana,” said Ocho dreamily.

Husky Kamon studied his friend closely and objected: “I don’t think you are pretty enough for Santana.”

Ocho waved around the empty water bottle, and Kamon said, “You get it.”

“Let’s play the game, stone, paper, sheesers.”

“No.”

“Come on man!”

“You’re closer!”

Ocho yielded and went off to get water, and then left again to retrieve their instruments from the car, which pealed in alarm at his drunken attempts to open the door. Finally they began the concert, for a French, German, Dutch, and American audience. Ocho’s fingers tore clumsily at complex chords, which turned wavy, clunky, and fervently harsh, accompanied by an erratic pounding on the guitar, a soft and almost wordless song, and by Kamon’s modest flute.

The next morning the sky thundered and poured, so I stayed under the tent to enjoy it. Nothing much was happening in Skopje, but it was Saturday night, so after exploring the town I drank with a few Brits and later with some Czechs, who had brought their own homemade slivovitz plum brandy in a plastic water bottle.

Neither Santana nor Patti Smith interested me, but when I saw a poster for a performance by Ennio Morricone (and after I verified that the great Italian composer was still alive, and it was not some posthumous tribute), I took a bus to Ohrid, site of the Ohrid Summer Festival, which Morricone’s symphony ushered in.

The concert was held in an ancient Roman theater, installed in a hillside, with white Turkish buildings layered behind, and below there was the lake, ringed with hills that turned hazy in the distance, a dark blue line between the light blue of lake and sky.

I avoided the forty euro ticket price by sitting on the grass behind the highest seats of the amphitheater, among the massed bodies of the plebeian audience, but showed up early enough to get a good seat, since my clock was still on Greek time and one hour ahead. Below in the stands sat the Balkan elite and the Presidents of Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo. The Macedonian premier, Dr. Gjorge Ivanov, gave an awkward proclamation from a notecard calling Ohrid an ancient seat of art lovers and declaring, on the Hour of the Dragon when Alexander was born, the forty day Festival begun.

The choir and orchestra preceded the conductor, and also torch-bearers: a priest in cloth-of-gold and a dozen Roman legionaries with girls in white on their arm. Then came Ennio, eighty years old and frail and mild with genius; short, but not one of those diminutive men who compensate for a poverty of stature with flashy activity. He seemed coiled and compressed energy, with a nobility of control over his musical passion.

His band played suites from The Untouchables and The Good The Bad & The Ugly. A woman in trailing red came out to howl the Ecstasy of Gold, and Ennio, an incorrigible Latin gentleman, kissed her hand and walked her off the stage before returning to conduct the militant marches of The Battle of Algiers and the contemplative melodies of Cinema Paradiso. The Mission followed, led by a woman who played Gabriel’s Oboe with full-bodied gyrations like a snake charmer. She returned for one of the three encores. Ennio also played the Ecstasy of Gold and the Untouchables one more time. There were fireworks, and everyone filed home. Men whistled the songs of the Guarini and tuned their chattering teeth into themes, for it had grown chilly.

I stayed in the Sunny Beach Hostel, up on the cobblestoned slope of Ohrid, between buildings like stone fortresses on the ground floor and white stucco on all upper levels, which jut out over the street incrementally. I found it with only a little help from the locals.

“Where are you going? You need direction? Oh, the hostel. Do you have a reservation? Well it is full. Come, I have rooms for rent, they are very nice. It is like hostel: there is Russian there. Hey wait! Where you from? America! I was in New Jersey once. Hey stop, let me show you the room! I have picture here. Hey!”

Macedonians are stern—not as giddy or playful as the Greeks. They don’t respond to goading with the same vapid rage, nor are they experts at the art of verbal harassment. They are as proud of Macedonia’s ancient exploits as the lowlanders, and indignant over the greedy denial of that shared history, yet the modern country is very different from the ancient nation: wedged between Albania, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Serbia, in cartography, language, and culture. Sun-baked as Bedouin they are, but with the girth of hearty highland meals. They play the Balkan bagpipes and flutes and drums, and live music generally means a few old folk tunes accompanied by a Casio. Pizza comes on edible plates of ice cream cone waffle and is drizzled with ketchup and mayonnaise.

The day after the concert, I walked around and liked what I saw. Ohrid was small and cheap and ancient, with many new and lively places, and many old and quiet ones, and was ringed with mountains and forests that kept it cool. The Anatolian heartland and Syrian wastes would be intolerably hot until September, so I had no reason to hurry. I declared I would stay a while, and turned contentedly lazy: reading and writing and thinking, eating and drinking, walking and hiking and swimming in the lake, with hostelers or locals or in solitude.

Once upon a time in Montenegro, a Macedonian named Lemon told me to come in high summer to his bar in Ohrid, called the Café Nemo, and to ask for him. He told me, “You will get laid ever-ee night. Ever-ee night.” With such promise, how could I refuse?

I went to this bar Tuesday with two Hollanders and an Australian, but Lemon, who they called a regular, was not there, nor was he on Friday’s attempt, made alongside one gang of the English rockers who had poured into Ohrid by the dozen in the wake of Exit Festival and sprinted immediately to a store to get beer before the 7 o’clock prohibition cast all aspiring drunks to the bars.

Their Cockney language, undimmed by attempts to make it intelligible to foreigners, was a marvel of slang and dialect, something criminally stereotypical. “I’m gonna jet,” they would say,—“It was fair cheap.” “Those blokes are from North London so watch out, they’ll nick your stuff. Nah, only joking mate, they seem like posh chaps.” I learned the difference between a yob and a zoot and felt much enlightened.

We ordered rakia and did not realize that we were supposed to sip from the tumblers, nor did we want to, raki being the foulest drink. As the comedian Myron Cohen once said of its Slavic cousin slivovitz, it makes Canadian Club taste like vanilla soda, and it does indeed taste like a drink three times more alcoholic, useful more in matters disinfective than digestive. We quaffed it quickly, and two of the Brits were violently and immediately ill there in the corner of the Jazz Inn.

The inmates of the familial hostelry were ninety percent English, with an insular Dutch couple, three extrovert Swedes, and the occasional Irishman and Australian mixed in for good measure, along with the Macedonian staff. While trying to figure a card game for four of us, one which could be played with one deck of cards and was simple enough for drunks, I astonished the Swedes by describing Egyptian Ratscrew, which was known by that name to natives of England and by a different one to the Swedes: Club the Seal, they called it. Swedish rules differed only slightly: the pile was not immediately yours on slapping a pair of cards, but had to be won from other claimants in a violent grabbing contest.

Daylight hours were much more comfortable: “sublime uneventfulness.” I discovered beyond Saint Jovan Kaneo a cove called Labino on the cool, clear water of the lake where, at the bottom of a dusty stair, plum trees shade a narrow and rocky strand, less crowded and more peaceful than the other beaches by its remote virtue, with stones perfect for skipping. With Ivanhoe and a few beers, it was like Paradise. At night the sun set over Albania and sprawled a gradient across the firmament: lined amber, lavender, and azure, yielding steadily before eastern star-strewn black. Saturday I met some Yale law students from the hostel on the beach. There was a swimming marathon that day, and canopied skiffs crowded the bay, escorting or observing the long-distance swimmers. Under the Argead flag and in such numbers they made Ohrid look like a Cantonese port.

On Thursday I hitchhiked out to Struga on the lake’s other side, and then into the wooded mountains to Dobar on a dam-formed lake. The scenery was beautiful. I looked around and then followed the highway out of town until it came to the dam. A man was sitting there on a guardrail, and I asked him with hands and place-names if the bus to Struga stopped there. It did, so I sat down to wait. A beaten old car pulled up and let out three men. They talked with the seated man, and then one of them told me, “No auto! No bus!” Another started pawing at my bag. I asked him what he was doing. “He wants to see what’s in your bag.”

“Well, he can’t. I’ll just auto-stop. Hey cut it out,” I said, stepping back from clutching hands. “What do you mean what’s in my bag?” I looked the highwayman over: old, with white in his thick black beard, but brawny. He had the sleeves of his denim shirt rolled back to show tattoos. A scowl turned the crow’s feet around his glare-proof eyes into spiderwebs. He looked like a Nantucket whaling captain, and not at all like anyone who should be checking my bag.

I remembered a story of T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence was crossing the desert with a few bodyguards and a load of British gold for the Arab cause when a gang of Bedu tribesmen sprang from the dunes and surrounded his small company. They made small talk, but their formation, wandering eyes, and cocked rifles made obvious their illicit intent. Lawrence acted promptly, sticking his camel prod in the leader’s face and asking him if his name was an obscenity. So taken aback was the robber-sheikh by this brazen display that he barely moved as Lawrence rode off.

I didn’t know any Macedonian insults, but I knew a few in English. “I don’t have anything. I have a book,” and I pulled it halfway out of the pouch to prove it. “You want Moby Dick you illiterate asshole?” With that I spun around and walked across the dam, with an even pace and proud posturing. I was very angry at such a bold attempt to steal my property. Up until then, I had never thought of wearing the money belt I brought, and walked around with my passport and iPod hanging out of my pocket, physical height and generalized caution my only securities. In Macedonia, that sense of safety changed suddenly.

At the end of the dam, I looked back. Though his gang had dispersed, Captain Ahab was still standing there in the road with his hands on his hips, a silhouette of rage, as angry as I was that his attempted intimidation had been rebuffed. I continued up the road as it circled the lake until a man picked me up. We stopped at a roadside fountain for water, and I felt better. But still hungry.