Shredded, Chopped, Delivered, They're Yours

We sat down to our very first lunch in Macedonia, on the waterfront in Ohrid, and ordered a "Macedonia salad."  It arrived bright red with specs of yellow, like an abstract tribute to the Macedonian flag.  Crisp bell pepper mixed with ripe tomato, throughout was sprinkled diced onion, garlic, parsley and the yellow pepper seeds that had been dislodged and set free to roam.  It was wonderful.  We never saw this salad again.  According to the googlepedia, "Macedonia salad" is diced fruit salad popular in Spain, France and Romania.  Good thing that didn't show up (though, pepper and tomato are botanic fruits).

If any salad earns the title of "Macedonia," it is without a doubt the shopska salata.  Definitely the national salad, as far as I can tell it is the most ordered and served dish in the country.  By itself, next to plates of grilled meat, it was right there alongside the salt and pepper shakers atop every table.  When I sounded the name out (written as Шопска салата) I figured it meant "chopped salad," but the name actually comes from the Shopi people who originate from the region in which Serbia, Macedonia and Bulgaria meet.  It starts of chopped - tomato, cucumber, sometimes pepper and onion - and is then covered, smothered, buried by grated sirene cheese.  Vegetables in disguise, it is usually topped with a single olive.  The first time I saw one, I thought it was a sundae. It's amazing that the cheese is so finely grated, it's basically feta.  I can't call it that, though.  While Greece may not be able to stop people from using the name "Macedonia," they certainly have legal claim to the term "Feta."

Shopska salata is sort of like a Greek salad recipe that's been fed through a paper shredder and Macedonian ordever salads are like Turkish meze that took a long soak in the Mediterranean. The term 'meze' is also used for these dips and spreads.  This pinwheel platter had all the usual suspects: clotted cream with diced pepper (kajmak), pindzur, ajvar, yogurt, white beans and herbed olives.  Yogurt, pepper, tomato, eggplant, garlic, parsley, cucumber, cheese and olives - you'd be amazed at how many combinations, uncooked, cooked, slow-cooked, can develop over centuries in a country with good taste.

The beginning and end of all ordevers is ajvar - the ritualistically made red pepper paste that Milka made "too much" of.  Its younger, fresher, relishy sibling is pindzur and taratur is its complement.  The recipe for taratur, like the other spreads, is different from place to place and kitchen to kitchen.  Traditionally, it's made with "soured milk," but we had sour cream and yogurt varieties.  With cucumber, garlic, lemon and herbs, it's almost a dead ringer for Greece's tzatziki - but the crushed walnuts on top brings in the earthier Ottoman influence.

The green markets in Macedonia have every fruit and vegetable imaginable (within the limitations of climate, of course) but every market goer leaves with the same three shapes weighing down their green plastic bag.  Cucumber. Tomato. Onion.  It's something we're getting very used to in this part of the world.  Refreshingly, in Macedonia, restaurants stray from the formula a bit. Mešana salata or 'mixed salad' quickly became our ruffage of choice.  Ironically, the mix was always served unmixed - a circle of colorful wedges like an edible Simon device.  Cabbage, cucumber, carrot, beet and tomato, served shredded, raw and sweet.

Traveling to Eastern Macedonia, the mixed salad went a little crazy.  There was more of an everything but the (plant next to the) kitchen sink, approach.  Here, a thick slice of sirene cheese would be thrown in, some small boiled potatoes, a few slivers of fried zucchini, a hard boiled egg.  Ordering a mešana salata went from a foolproof plan to surprise-surprise.  At the end of two weeks in any country, a change-up is welcome.  Macedonia just pulled one more trick out of its bag at the last moment to make sure we remembered its salads lovingly.  And we will.

This post stands in for a Macedonian Food post or a Things Macedonian People Like post.  For more about the cuisine, check out our Macedonian Home Cooking post and, while you're at it, here's something they really like.

Worshiping Nature

We've spoken with a lot of people here in Macedonia.  It's rare that we pass a day or even an afternoon without pleasantries that turn into drinks or an invitation for future drinks with a local.  In this time, we've been asked what religion we are and - just yesterday - "do you believe in god?"  Taken aback by both questions, we didn't have ready, assured answers.  What we did know - and were happy to report - was that we'd visited a lot of places of worship in their wonderful country.  What had brought us to most of them, however, was a different kind of worship.

Sometimes, you just need a destination to define your journey.  Macedonia is a beautiful, wonderful place to hike.  You'll stumble upon any number of things in a short period of time.  There are over 50 lakes here and 16 mountains over 6500 feet.  But what you'll stumble upon most often, are churches.  The tourist information available for the country focuses on its monasteries and churches.  And why not?  They are plentiful and old, picturesque and historic.  For us, a forest chapel is like a waterfall - except that you can't hear it from a ways away.  It's that place to arrive at which defines your last hour or two or three as a journey to a remote place.

Arriving there, right then, you feel a part of a living history.  You think about how the hike you just took as a nature joyride was a commute born out of necessity for the small chapel's congregation.  It being placed that far outside of the main village was just a part of its beauty and purpose.  When I reach churches like this one, in Brajcino, I feel like there's no way it wasn't placed here in order to give every single worshiper this magnificent lookout point.  To worship nature on the way to mass - I like to think, as a part of mass.

Inside one of the remote churches in Brajcino, we found candles recently blown out and the matches used to light them.  There were unused ones in a box for the use of any visitor.  This was not shuttered or forgotten, it was clearly still in use.  People all over the country tell us about how their town used to have multiple churches, "one for each family."  In Prilep, Hristijian remarked that he had never been to his friend's church before - just two blocks away from his.  In Macedonia, it is not only your faith that is personal and held dear, it is also the physical place of your worship.

Macedonia became its own country in 1991.  For many, an important step to national and cultural independence was the archbishopric of Ohrid's break away from the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1958.  The churches of Ohrid are steeped in history.  Above, the interior of the Church of St. Sophia, built sometime between 800 and 1000 AD.  It was one of the first houses of worship constructed after the official switchover to Christianity.  Of course, it was turned into a mosque for a while during Ottoman rule.  All the churches were.  We visited the 'cross mosque,' which is literally a mosque with a cross on top.  "The only one in the world!"  (They've never been to Eger, Hungary).  For us, all of these houses of worship were wonderful trail markings on a path around the lake.   Exquisite blazes.  

In Prilep, the mosque has seen better days.  It is ruined and unlit at night.  The inside appears to be a favorite peeing spot according to our noses.  The clock tower nearby is topped with a cross.  Ruined churches and mosques have a sadder feeling to them when within a town or city.  Out amongst grass and old stone walls, their decay feels natural.  It feels less like neglect and more like the sign of times gone by.

There are countries that have felt more religious than Macedonia feels.  In some, women wore headscarves, in others, roadside shrines dotted the Is and crossed the Ts of the countryside.  Here, it's just a part of landscape.  A church pops up in a field the same way god pops up in conversation.  We will leave here with memories of long sweaty hikes and the cool stone churches at the end of them.  And at least half a dozen prayer cards in our backpack.

The Bitola-Skopje Train

All provincial train stations have a weary countenance built up over years of waiting.  The station master’s shirt is starched and blue.  The ticket men are disheveled and nimble-fingered. All stations have the same stretched, narrow shape along the tracks, the same graffiti scratched into old plaster. The waiting rooms are dark, the benches are slatted wood, the platforms have a windswept loneliness.  There are precise, square-edged clocks.  These aren’t the terminuses, the bustling hubs of the cities - these are buildings put up to give small towns a hold on the tracks. Train stations are meant to be passed by and left behind.
On our way from Prelip up to Skopje, we left from one of these engine-buffeted buildings, passed dozens more and met some very interesting people.  This is why we love traveling by train.

The day before we went we walked to find the station, which was difficult.  Prelip stretches, like many big plains towns, in a disorganized, flat sprawl.  When we asked a man for directions, he insisted on driving us.  “But,” he said, “why are you taking the train?  The bus is the same price and faster.”  When we told him that we like trains, he looked amused.  “In Macedonia,” he said, “the trains aren’t good.  They are like from last century.”
The journey began in the heat of early afternoon.   The waiting room was full of older people and their little bags.  One man carried a few spools of wire.  A pair of swallows swooped in from time to time, perched and then flew back out.

It’s amazing to think of powerful, momentous movement after this quiet.  The mood in the station was subdued, everyone was hot and an hour passed slowly.  When the train came, it seemed like a surprise, even though we’d all been thinking about it.
It’s a short route, traveling from Bitola – the cosmopolitan hub of the south – up to the capital, stopping along the way to pay grudging, hurried respects to the places in between.  There are four trains a day.  The track isn’t used for much else.

On this train, there were no rows of seats – the cars were broken up into compartments.  This meant that, when we boarded, everyone began rushing up and down the aisles, peeking through doors and looking for a cabin with both a place to sit and occupants willing to give up the spare place.  After some looking, two young men nodded us into their cabin – which is how we met Victor and his wordless (non-English speaking) friend.
They were university students, nineteen years old, and returning from Bitola to their hometown of Veles.  Victor had a jokey, cocksure nature that came from being young and from long years of work and near self-sufficiency (he’d been working since he was eleven, and had spent some years alone, laboring in Bulgaria).  The early current of conversation took us by a litany of common hard-luck stories – Macedonia is difficult, he has no money, there is no future in the Balkans – but then turned to the scenery and the beauty of the country.  It is beautiful, especially seen blurred by the dreamlike lens of a train window.

The journey from Prilep to Skopje takes about two and a half hours.  The country changes as the train goes north – the ground gets dryer and scrubbier, there’s more red soil showing between blades of grass – but the topography mostly stays the same.  There are mountains, but they’re mostly low and smooth edged, nothing like the jagged peaks around the perimeter of the country.  Much is farmland, but the prevailing green is in the hue of forests rather than fields.
Victor like to smoke (“if I had money, I wouldn’t smoke,” he said.  “But you can’t do anything in Macedonia for forty dinar except buy cigarettes”) and he had his friend keep watch for the conductor while he puffed out the window.  A young law-student named Jasmina joined us at a small station – she was headed back to Skopje to her job at a notary’s office.  We all looked out at the passing countryside.  The other three had seen it many times before, but they took a fresh interest because of us.

Every few miles, the train would stop at a platform.  Sometimes, there would be a station house, sometimes only a concrete step on the edge of a forest.  There were always a few people waiting, but they wouldn’t always get on.  Often, a package would be handed down and a few words of greeting would be shared.
Victor didn’t seem to like the train much more than the man in Prelip.  “If you have to be in Skopje at four, you must take the bus.  This train is from the old times.  It might take three hours, it might take nine.  And then you are sitting there in the dark, and you can’t get to Skopje.”  Our experience, though, was nothing like that.  The train seemed to get to every stop on time, and was waved on officially and easily by the blue-uniformed station master.  Each yellow-painted station was unique - but nothing more than a minute of the journey, still a part of the forward motion.

Victor and his friend put their sunglasses on and stepped off the train in Veles, some half hour before we got to our destination.  Before they left us, Victor gave us a mostly-full plastic bottle of homemade rakija liquor.  There was more than a liter in the bottle, and we tried to tell him that it was too much, but he insisted we take it.  It grated on the throat but he was proud and we told him it was good.  He said that he would be staying with his father, and that his father’s rakija was much stronger.  “He says that he likes to drink Rakija, not water!”

Arriving in Skopje, we noticed that our train, which we had come to think of as quaint, suddenly felt like a creature of the city.  In those hours inside, with the verdant afternoon slipping by, we hadn’t seen the graffiti on the outside of the cars or the angular nose of the diesel engine. This was a creature that blasted through the pastoral outside, arriving at home in its metropolis to pant and rest for a while before heading back to Bitola.
We were asked again, in town, why we’d taken the train instead of the bus.  Macedonians aren’t proud of their railway (I’m not sure why, really).  It’s hard to explain to them, but a train is something different to an American than it is to a European.  Punctuality and luxury aren’t that important.  It’s wonderful to be able to stand up and lean out an open window as goats and barns and waving children rush by.  Conversations begin and end, a few new faces become familiar.  Traveling this way, one doesn’t see the roads or the fronts of buildings – just the backcountry.  The rhythm of the starts and stops is a pleasure all its own.  For us, it’s something foreign in itself.

Fikjo, The Cutest Macedonian

I was taking pictures of a white Zastava 750 on a hot day in Prelip when the owner came out on his porch.  “Zastava,” I said, pointing at the car and feeling silly.  “Take it,” he said, making a shooing motion with his hand.  “Please, I don’t want it.  Take it away.”
The car’s seats were broken and threadbare, rusted cracks fanned out around the headlights, it was missing its front fender. But it was still endearing.  This is one of the cutest and most memorable cars of the trip, a pipsqueak with personality.  It’s also uniquely Yugoslavian, a kind of makeshift symbol of the Balkans – Macedonians lovingly nickname it “Fikjo,” but this is a machine with many monikers.

Italians might sneeringly proclaim the Fikjo nothing but a Fiat 600 with a different emblem on the nose.  Americans would be confused by the name Zastava – we knew the company as “Yugo.”  But we Yankees would be surprised to find such a capable and winning car made by the company that gave us this, and the Italians aren’t quite correct.  It’s true that the 750 is based on the Fiat 600, but there are some differences.  The Fikjo is a little longer than its Italian cousin, and it was scaled down a little inside to make it more economical.

They’re ramabout, wheezy-voiced, easily dented or fixed.  Fikjo, the name, is a Macedonian derivation of “Фићa” (“Fića”), a Serbian newspaper comicstrip.  It’s fitting, a kind of plucky, amusing identity.  It’s the kind of car that we Americans find romantic because we don’t have them anymore and Europeans find unappealing because they need to live with them.

We’ve seen dozens of Fikjos in Macedonia.  At first, it was difficult to tell exactly what they were because so many of them are missing their faux-chrome emblems. But we were attracted to the bright colors and tiny bodies.
It’s testament to their durability that there are still so many examples tooling around the streets of the country.  Their 24 horsepower engines emit a laughably impotent drone, something like that of a mo-ped carrying too much weight.  Zastava’s own estimate (I’m using that word to mean “hopeful guess”) proclaims that the car could accelerate from zero to sixty miles per hour in 51 seconds.  It would take someone brave to get this little tin box going that fast, though, and probably a long downhill stretch.

The Zastava 750 was immensely popular in Yugoslavia. Capable, affordable and government made, the car brought about the dawn of the automotive age in this part of the world, playing the part that the Model T did in America, or the Citroën Deaux-Chevaux did in France.  The factory in Kragujevac (in modern day Serbia), produced some 930,000 of these little things between 1955 and 1984, almost all of them sold within the Balkans. 

In recent years, a few Fikjo driver clubs have been created and the model has begun to see an upswing in popularity.  Parked near the oil wrestling in Çalıklı, we saw a shiny 750 with racing stripes and a rear spoiler.  There are fan groups in the UK and France as well as here.  The car has suddenly become a piece of nostalgia.

Zastava fell on hard times after the wars of the 1990’s, and eventually was completely subsumed by Fiat, which had a major stake in the company for years.  The old assembly plant is being retrofitted to begin producing modern Fiat cars, but the process is slow and the future seems uncertain.

In most cases, the old communist underpinnings in these countries have been covered up and plowed under.  But there are beloved reminders of those days, too, that transcend hardship.  For someone born towards the end of Tito's reign, it's easy to love the Fikjo.  It's one of the few bits of history left, roaming the streets, coughing at red lights, clanging with life.

(The Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia's Third Lake

Looking out over Lake Dojran in Macedonia you can clearly see the foreign land of.... Macedonia? Greek Macedonia sits right across the water, its green hills and spinning white wind turbines giving the little town of Dojran a dirty look.  It wants to be the only 'Macedonia' on the block.  Our first knowledge of the ongoing (and politically vicious) name dispute between Greece and Macedonia came from an email we received from a Greek blog follower asking us to please change 'Macedonia' to 'FYROM- Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.'  He went on to say that "Macedonia is located in Northern Greece" and has been for thousands of years.  He concluded that "Hellenic people surely get insulted when somebody tries to grab their history for various reasons."  Whoa - struck a nerve.

The historic region of 'Macedonia' is believed to have covered land in modern day Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Serbia.  The biggest chunks, almost exactly equal parts, were in what is now Greek Macedonia and the Republic of Macedonia.  Still, when Macedonia chose its name after becoming independent of Yugoslavia in 1991, Greece was pissed.  The young country's original flag design was changed to appease their neighbor and NATO accepted them under the provisional name of FYROM for Greece's sake.  

More two decades later, most countries (including the United States, whose State Department list we base our classifications of what is or isn't a European country and what they are named) simply refer to Macedonia as 'Macedonia.'  Greece, however, has succeeded in blocking the struggling country's EU acceptance due to the naming dispute.  Even though the International Court of Justice just ruled that this violated all sorts of agreements between the neighbors, this sort of political road-blocking doesn't look like it will end any time soon.

I wanted to put my passport in a swimming cap and cross the mid-lake border, but Merlin advised against it.  I also didn't have a swimming cap.  It was hard not to think about the dispute looking at the small border lake.  Never have we been so close to the border of a country and felt absolutely none of its influence.  There was no cultural blurring in Dojran.  No signs of stones-throw-away Greece at all.  In fact, Lake Dojran is currently returning to a lot of its cultural roots in an attempt to bolster tourism.  It is a tiny body of water, rich with fish and algae - and Macedonian tradition.

People come here to slather themselves with the lake's seaweed rich mud and swim in the warm water, both believed to cure rheumatism, skin diseases, muscle and bone problems and respiratory diseases.  For over a third of the year, it is a bath-like 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  Fishing is done in the winter, using an ancient method which employs cormorants.  A band is fashioned around the birds' long necks, just tight enough to prohibit them from being able to swallow larger birds.  They fly out, dive down, swim around, catch fish, eat all the ones that slip down easily and deliver the larger ones to the fishermen.  It's a pretty amazing technique, more famous in China and Japan, and is executed from these fishing huts on stilts in the water.

The tradition was dying out until people realized that tourists would love to see this sort of thing.  Now, plans are underway to start a "old-style fishing school" at Dojran and build traditional korabs for joyrides.  While keeping these old ways alive is important, the byproduct of this sort of enterprising (no doubt inspired by Lake Ohrid's tourism boom) is that little Lake Dojran will be cared for and kept alive.  For lakes, this means kept filled.  After years of using the water to irrigate cropland nearby and for other survival methods, Lake Dojran lost about 30% of its water.

Shallower water must have made it even easier to find the fish!  Legend has it that Herodotus proclaimed, in the 5th century AD, that if one set a basket in the water at night, it would be full by morning.  Just teeming with fishies.  Sources claim that Lake Dojran is the most fish rich lake of its size in Europe.  Of the swimming creatures, the carp is the most famous.  In Macedonian, it is krap - which elicited many giggles.  We'd read that it was the best carp we would ever eat - certainly the best krap - unlike any other we've tasted.  You know what, it's true.  

We ate a crazy looking carp in Germany, ordered carp 'cubes' and 'ribs' in the Czech Republic, compared and contrasted carp-heavy Hungarian fish soup and even used carp scraps for a delicious home-cooked meal in Budapest, but none of it holds a candle to the carp of Lake Dojran.  At a lakefront restaurant named Nota, it was served fried with two lemon water hand baths.  We ate it like fried chicken and it was nearly as juicy, with none of the muddy flavor carp often has.  It reminded me a lot of swordfish, a clean, meaty taste and fatty but toothsome flesh.  Delicious.  I wonder what kind of Lake Dojran fishing rights deal Greece and Macedonia have worked out.

Hıdırellez Bahar Şenlikleri - The Spring Fest

We passed three dead snakes on the narrow country road to Çalıklı.  The drive took us through empty fields and near a dry streambed.  The road signs for the town were spelled in different ways – one read “Çalıklı,” another “Çaleklı.”
It’s not a big village.  There are about twenty houses and a whitewashed mosque.  A big crowd had gathered around a cow pasture.  We parked the car beside a few buses and walked over with our cameras.  Circled by a few hundred onlookers, pairs of men – bare to the waist, slicked with oil and sweat, their chests heaving – wrestled one another while a man wandered between them with a drum.  This was unexpected, but we hadn’t really known what to expect – we’d come to the Hıdırellez Bahar Şenlikleri (Turkish for “Hıdırellez Spring Festival”) knowing only that there would be singing and dancing.

It was a hot day in south-eastern Macedonia, some twenty miles from the Greek border, and most of the people cheering on the wrestlers had gathered in what little shade there was – under a few umbrellas and beneath the new leaves of three sycamores on the pasture’s edge.  There is very little information about this festival online, and we had come feeling as though we were following a rumor.
But there we were, watching this ancient Turkish sport and feeling amazed to be part of it.  A man played a kind of wooden horn loudly, the drum beat a laconic rhythm, judges roamed the ring in baggy şalvar trousers.  The contestants did elaborate dances between matches – ritualized, springing, arm-flailing displays to exhort applause from the crowd.  Winners were carried back to their groups on the shoulders of friends.  The losers lay on the grass panting before slinking to the sidelines.  Before every round, the men poured oil over their shoulders, their heads and the leather pants they wore, making themselves as slick as possible.

In Albania, the culture felt more Greek the closer we got to the border – here, though, it feels as though we’ve skipped over the Hellenic lands and landed somewhere near Anatolia.  There are lots of ethnic Turkish and Roma settlements in the lands around Strumica, and the language is heavily influenced by those cultures. Hıdırellez is a pan-Turkic festival that celebrates the coming of spring and the awakening of life – it has roots going back to ancient Mesopotamia, and various Muslim countries celebrate something similar.  In Macedonia, it’s as much about celebrating Turkish identity as anything, and it means a lot to the people of Strumica and Çalıklı.  Groups of dancers and wrestlers come from all over – from Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and even Azerbaijan.
Interestingly, the non-Turkish people in the area seemed hardly to know it was going on – or to know, but not want to say anything about it.

That night, in Strumica, we asked around, trying to figure out where a Hıdırellez concert we’d been told about would take place.  A man at the cultural center shook his head and said nothing, looking down at the ground.  A man at our hotel said he wasn’t sure.  A woman at the highschool was very friendly until we asked about Çalıklı and the spring festival – she began abruptly to walk away.
We actually took this to mean that there had been some mistake, and that nothing was happening.  It wasn’t until that night, when we heard drums and horns in the central square, that we realized there certainly was something going on.

A group of young dancers in red costumes danced energetically and strangely to music played by a few kids.  The musicians had a flute-like instrument, a trumpet and a drum – they played lively, fluttering music as loudly and quickly as they could.  The dancers did a jumping, line dance routine, turning their heads stoically from side to side in unison as they flicked the draping of their clothes and the streamers on their hats.  Only about ten people were watching.
It was a magical, powerful revelry and a beautiful sight in the dark.  And then it was over.  The lot of them stopped and filed into the cultural center.  We followed them and found more music.

Inside, a raucous crowd danced and sang along to unfamiliar songs.  The musicians sat in tuxedos, playing well.  The singer was probably famous.  She wore a long sleeved, flowing, red dress and a cascade of blonde-tinted curls.  Teenagers laughed and talked and cheered, running in and out of the auditorium with friends or standing in the aisles to socialize.  Parents and grandparents sat and gossiped.  The hairstyles were sculptural and full of grease, the clothes were tight and skimpy.  It was hot, the music was loud.  We stayed for about half an hour, standing in a crush of young people near the door.
Later that night, at about 1:30 in the morning, we heard the young drummer and trumpet player go noisily by under our window – the street was still lively and a small ruckus rose and followed them as they played.  It woke us up and we would have been more upset if they didn’t seem so earnestly celebratory.

The next afternoon we went back out to Çalıklı but found ourselves a little late.  The young dancers – more of them now, bussed in from different places – were changing out of their costumes and into their best festival clothes.  The oil-wrestling field was empty now except for a few heifers, but there were still hundreds of people.  We followed the crowds up through a lane of country-fair stands – toy guns and headscarves for sale, grilling kofte and beer drinking men under tarps.  The older women dressed in full tradition robes, their best silks.  The younger people preferred tight pants and tanktops.  There was much hello-saying and groups of talking friends. We made our way up past the mosque to a covered stage, where people were sitting in the shade and waiting for a performance to begin.

We waited too and talked with a few people.  We’d received a lot of quizzical looks but never felt uncomfortable.  Even though we didn’t fit in the locals seemed more proud of their festival than protective.
Eventually, the same red-dressed, probably-famous singer emerged from her van and began to sing the same songs as the night before.  The audience here was more staid.  They seemed to be from the countryside instead of Strumica – they watched more attentively, the clothes were more traditional.  Around the stage, tractors were parked and a few cows were tied up.

We left with the woman’s voice still ululating in our ears.  A few amorous youths were lurking out by the line of parked cars and buses on the road.  Popsicle wrappers and soda cans littered the ground.  As we drove away, we could still see smoke from the kofte barbeques rising behind us.  The festival was winding down, and we weren’t the only car driving out along the little road.  A scattering of townspeople sat in chairs along the way, watching the traffic from their front yards.
It was an incredible experience.  Even after three events over two days, we felt as though we’d only caught a bare glimpse of something.  As an older man said to us by the wrestling field, this was “something very special.”  He watched the athletes and seemed caught by emotion.  “We didn’t always have this,” he said, meaning he and his Turkish neighbors.  “For us, this is something special.”  You can imagine how we felt.

The Hıdırellez Bahar Şenlikleri in Çalıklı is celebrated over three days around the fifth of May.

Prilep and the American Dream

Invitations in Macedonia come like threats.  There's no way to demure, you've been invited.  And so we ended up drinking rakija with a family in the outer limits of Prilep, an ancient tobacco town set down where the Pelagonia plains meet the Rhodope mountains.  We talked with the family about America and Macedonia in their front yard, sitting under a plum tree and waving to neighbors and passers by.
Two brothers talked about their father, who sat with us but spoke little English.  Hristijan, the younger brother, told us how their father had gone to Australia but had come back because he was in love with Hristijan's mother, a decision that seemed unbelievable to him.  "But he likes it here in Macedonia," Hristijan said, as though explaining something blasphemous.  The father nodded.  Later, he said that we should take a young nephew or two home with us in our suitcases.  It was a joke, but a heavy one.  Everyone wants to leave Prilep.
It's too bad, because Prelip is a great town.

Afflicted with very low self esteem, this town of seventy thousand has a lot going for it.  It seems that the population has begun to believe the guidebooks, which dismiss Prelip as an uninteresting, blue-collar town that won't fit easily into an Ohrid to Skopje whirlwind tour.  It's true that it's out of the way, isolated from the main tourist hubs in the western part of the country, and that there's a scant four or five places to stay, but to give it only one page (like Lonely Planet does) in a guide is shameful.

The rakija that we drank with Hristijan, his father, his brother Pancho, his friend Goran and Pancho's wife Valentina was homemade from village plums and a pale green - colored by sprigs of peppermint in the bottle ("good for the stomach").  It was strong enough to burn, but well made enough to be complex and subtle.  As we sat, a few neighbors drove by with a cart full of firewood and two plastic barrels.  Jokes and pleasantries were exchanged.  When the men left, Hristijan told us that they were going to a friend's still, off to make their own rakija.  "Why is it illegal to make alcohol in America?" they asked.  "Here it's tradition, it's what we drink for thousands of years.  This IS Macedonia!"
We'd arrived at their house after a hot hike up to the towers of King Marco, who is a legendary figure in the national folklore but was in fact a minor ruler in the 14th century.  The views out over the tobacco plains and low mountains were spectacular, the kind of open, rock-and-grass walking that makes this region so appealing.

The brothers had learned English watching westerns with their father.  The elder man liked the landscapes of the movies because it reminded him of home; the dust, the crowns of rock, the wide vistas.  In fact, it feels a lot like an American town here - though, in some ways, much more colorful.  Tobacco fields creep right up to the streetlights and sidewalks, people buy their loose smoke in the markets.  There are more cafes here than in provincial America, the town center is full of life, there aren't any empty storefronts.  It feels, a little, like an America of the past.

The town is appealing, with some wide avenues and narrow, medieval lanes.  There are plentiful trees and friendly people, dozens of busy watering holes and a constant burble of conversation.  There are a few nice museums, some handsome old houses, a vibrant market.  It's the kind of undiscovered outpost that travelers crave, where the local customs mix easily with modernity in an unaffected, friendly way.  Tourists are still a rarity, university students are abundant, everyone knows everyone else and nobody's in a hurry.  It's a perfect example of what we call "cafe culture."  In other words, it is much more cosmopolitan than its citizens think it is.

We stopped into this blacksmith's shop one evening.  An old man stood by the furnace and anvil, a couple of friends sat nearby, talking.  When I asked if I could take a picture he pulled an ax head from the coals and began pounding it rhythmically.  After a few clamorous moments, it had achieved a rough shape, and he put it back into the coals and smiled.  "It's made easily," he said (in semi-russian that we only kind of understood) and winked.  His face was lopsided and mischievous, his eyes were bright blue.  We realized that it was the first time we'd ever seen a real, working blacksmith's shop that wasn't part of some museum or skansen.

During a tour of some of the town's outer neighborhoods by Hristijan and Goran, the two friends waved to almost everyone they passed, occasionally stopping the car (yes, this was after we'd finished the bottle of rakija) to have a few words with someone.
Hristijan showed us the ancient Monastery of the Archangel Michael, and Goran showed us his church.  Hristijan sat for a minute with friends at a picnic table and Goran took us to a new amphitheater that he and his neighbors had built.  The sun was getting low and the light was golden.  Children rode their bikes nearby, birds sang their evening songs.  The amphitheater was small and quiet.  Goran told us that it was meant to give the town something like Ohrid or the Greek cities, a place for the community to come together.  It was striking, this closeness of people and the many friendships that they all shared.  When we were being driven back to our hotel, much later, Goran and Hristijan talked reverently about the man who had gone to America, built a fortune and just returned to buy the hotels and set up a factory.  As they dropped us off, they ran into a man they both knew walking with his wife and new baby.  They all exchanged hugs and gave the baby many kisses.

As we sat in that sunny yard, having a last cup of coffee and lemonade, Hristijan told us that his father had built their house by himself and was justifiably proud of it.  When Rebecca told him that my father had also built his own house, Hristijan leaned toward me and struck a wistful tone.  "Merlin," he asked, "do you think we will build houses for our families?"
The question touched on many things - his father's happiness in Prilep, thoughts about America, the hope for a better life.  Hidden there was a different question: where would he build his house?  Many times Hristijan talked about American television and what he had seen, about the movies.  He'd asked about what one could earn in America doing different jobs.  These are common questions, common strains in the conversation of far away places.  It's hard to address them without sounding disingenuous.  Of course living in America is wonderful, but it's not like the television shows.

That night we went out for dinner in the town center.  It was Friday night and the crowded squares were full of laughter.  The warm air smelled like imminent summer rain.  Girls in short skirts linked arms and clipped down the streets in high heels.  Boys in dark sunglasses chased them on motor scooters.  Groups of friends spilled from one pool of light to another, from the music of one cafe to the next.  The city was beautiful, a jangling mix of colors.
We began to talk about what Hristijan wanted, about how it's natural for people to want to move somewhere better.  After all, living in Macedonia isn't easy.  But seeing a place like this - a place that feels so alive and friendly, where everyone is acquainted and strangers are invited in for a drink - it's hard to believe that dusty American towns actually are better.
Don't believe the guidebooks or American television shows - Prilep is a lot nicer than people think.