Lake Ohrid: an oasis of peace in the war-torn Balkans

Kapka Kassabova’s previous travel book, Border, was rightly acclaimed and won several prizes. The author travelled to the edge of Europe, between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, and teased out ‘where something like Europe begins and something else ends, which isn’t quite Asia’.

This is a sequel of sorts. She now travels to another border, that between Macedonia, Albania and Greece, where the vast and beautiful Lake Ohrid remains one of the Balkans’ surviving religious melting pots, despite considerable nationalist pressure. It is where her mother was originally from, so her journey is partly a rediscovery of her own roots.

Kassabova feels as though she came from a family pattern of absent men and the women they left behind — ‘we are epigenetically determined to wander’. She herself has taken a very unusual route, emigrating with her parents from Bulgaria to New Zealand, but then leaving that country as an adult to live in the highlands of Scotland.