Alexander and Theresa

It was home to Alexander the Great and Mother Theresa but Macedonia is now a tourist destination.
Konstantin’s first words to us were “Macedonians welcome guests at midnight the same as at mid-day. They welcome with spring water, bread, cheese and salt, fruit and brandy. They kiss three times – for life, for death and for honour.”
He was fair-skinned, dark-haired and handsome and, like most of the people we saw in the streets of the towns, dressed in western-style clothes.

Konstantin, like everyone in the towns, wanted to practise English . Their own language is, to say the least, complex. “It is not like Serbian”, he said “Or even Slav”. “More like Bulgarian”. “I see”, I said, “Quite so!”
In town there was little sign of those round Balkan hats or women’s headscarves that you see in pictures supposedly showing the typical local dweller. These were the preserve of the villages.

But the towns, like the villages, have a “we are not in any hurry” kind of pace to them. Macedonians say they are not laid back, it is just that the scales of the work/life balance tilt heavily on the side of life. And good for them. We went out on the lake at St Naum just outside Ohrid with Nikola rowing his boat. He spent a little time rowing and a lot of time resting on his oars, sometimes asking us to listen to the sounds of nature, sometimes telling stories and sometimes singing us a Balkan song. We enjoyed Nikola’s company so much that it was 5.30 pm before we got to the restaurant for lunch. Turns out that that 5.30 is pretty standard for lunch in Macedonia.

Skopje, the capital, is known in the west mainly from its days as a landing point for visitors to the old Jugoslavia. It has 600,000 inhabitants who have survived nazism, communism and that dreadful earthquake. In the extreme north, where Macedonia butts up against Serbia, Skopje’s buildings bear the slab-sided signature of the communist sixties but it is morphing into a pedestrianised café-and-boutique type of place. The most interesting part is the old town in which we found a working blacksmith operating next door to a wood-panelled barber’s shop where I had an old-fashioned shave complete with shaving soap, brush, hot towels and cut-throat razor.

Before Jugoslavia was even thought of, Macedonia had its own history going way, way back. Back, in fact, to Alexander the Great who originated from here. If every schoolboy knows this, not so many know that it was also home to Mother Teresa.

Possibly the most impressive thing that strikes you about this entrancing small country of 2m people is its cultural display of all kinds. The people are proud of the art-rich cultural mix which has been developed over hundreds of years, if not thousands. They are industriously digging and restoring extensive Roman sites all across the country. We saw the biggest, at Heraklea a few minutes outside Bitola, in the very south of the country next to the border with Greece. The remains of baths, a church, a theatre and a forum were all there as well as beautiful and extensive mosaics. The next biggest Roman town at Stobi is only 40 miles away.

A special characteristic of the Balkans is that the multifarious immigrants who have come to the area over the centuries have never had it in mind to integrate into anything like one nation. This means that the whole region is crowded with myriad varieties of dress, language, religion and architecture. The National Museum in Skopje shows scores of almost unrecognisably different forms of dress for every few miles of the tiny country. And it is covered with churches of all types – Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim. You could get monastery fatigue if it were not for the breathtaking woodcarving and icons of the monasteries of St John the Baptist in the Mavrovo mountains, St Mary the Beautiful and St Saviour in Skopje, itself.