To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace

by Kapka Kassabova

Overview

The celebrated author of Border explores a mysterious, ancient, and little-understood corner of Europe

Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region’s past and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova’s maternal family.

As she journeys to her grandmother’s place of origin, Kassabova encounters a historic crossroads. The lakes are set within the mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania, and Greece, and crowned by the old Via Egnatia, which once connected Rome to Constantinople. A former trading and spiritual nexus of the southern Balkans, this lake region remains one of Eurasia’s most diverse corners. Meanwhile, with their remote rock churches, changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the lakes live in their own time.

By exploring on water and land the stories of poets, fishermen, and caretakers, misfits, rulers, and inheritors of war and exile, Kassabova uncovers the human destinies shaped by the lakes. Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy, Kassabova locates a deeper inquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, one that confronts her with universal questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644451243
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Kapka Kassabova grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria, and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. Her most recent book is Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Table of Contents

Maps xii-xv

Introduction 1

Give me wings 9

Longing for the South 11

Part 1 Spring

Ochrida hangs on a hillside 25

Macedonian Girl 27

Biljana washed her linens 45

Whose Are You? 47

Lake Ohrid 75

Across the Lake 77

Girl of the waves 97

One Thousand Seven Hundred Years 99

I knew this rock 115

The Keeper of the Black Madonna 117

Swaying between joy and sorrow 133

Roads 135

The valley where we lived 151

The Poetry and the Hunger 153

We are the remnants of another age 177

Besa 179

The lake is a crystal 201

Mountain of Bones 203

Part 2 Autumn

In the village 225

Poets of Pogradec 227

The streaks on their faces 249

Libertà 251

Lake Prespa and Little Prespa 265

Vale of Ghosts 267

The king had goat ears 297

Of Men and Islands 299

I saw everything clearly now 313

The Howl 315

A man was tormented 357

How to Heal the Insane and the Melancholy 359

Acknowledgements 373

Glossary 375

Epigraph Sources 377

Bibliography 379

Editorial Reviews

06/01/2020

Bulgarian-born poet Kassabova (Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe), who now lives in Scotland, explores the religious, political, and ethnic tangles of the Balkans in this potent and meditative travelogue steeped in family history. Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa, nestled in the mountains between western Macedonia and eastern Albania, provide Kassabova’s entry point into the region as she searches for her maternal grandmother’s roots: “What I had come to seek was as simple as it was elusive—continuity of being through continuity of place.” During a tour of Lake Ohrid’s eastern shore, Kassabova sketches Macedonia’s history, vividly describes its natural beauty, and recounts the life of her great-grandfather, Kosta, who rowed across the lake in 1929 to escape political persecution in Bulgaria. Exploring Lake Prespa, Kassabova delves into Albania’s long history of repression and violence, including the ruthless rule of communist dictator Enver Hoxha. Despite the grim history of regional strife, Kassabova’s faith in the power of forgiveness leads her to draw hopeful conclusions about the past and the future of the Balkans. This heartfelt exploration of the intersections between geography, history, and identity mesmerizes. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

’Spirit’ is an apt word for Kassabova. The author is a consummate adventurer and indiscriminate observer. . . . Talking to strangers is her me´tier; in kiosks, at curbsides, and in cafés, she harvests myriad little sagas, which cast their own light (or shadow) over a land it seems no one can quite definitively call their own. . . . Kassabova’s book shines . . . in the casual precision of the author’s own observations. Her style is wily and imaginative, with sentences rapidly gliding into the unexpected.”—Bookforum

“Kassabova’s journey is . . . expansive. This, coupled with the raw candor of its many conversations, gives the book an undeniable pulse. Through its sincerity and profundity, To the Lake proves Kapka Kassabova’s to be one of Eurasia’s definitive literary voices.”—World Literature Today

“Borders and their intrinsic, deforming violence remain Kassabova’s subject. But in this book she goes further, tracing the intrusion of those cracks deeper into the souls and psyche of successive generations, herself included. . . . The book’s achievement . . . is to reconcile, thrillingly, what those twin bodies of water represent to Kassabova: the unconscious and the conscious; the darkness of history and the radiance of life and love.”—The Guardian (UK)

“To the Lake is an exquisitely written rallying cry to embrace the notion that the people of the Balkans—and indeed humanity as a whole—have more in common than what divides them, despite generations of strife suggesting otherwise.”– Financial Times (UK)

“By showing us the intricate ways in which human paths cross, Kassabova instills the image of kindness we need to show one another if we are to make it through the unexpected twists of fate. And just as the locals are never able to leave the lake, so the reader is bound to discover that they too will never be able to leave the book’s potent message behind.”—Asymptote

“In lyrical, radiant prose, [Kapka Kassabova] recounts her journey to the lakes in a quest to understand the historical forces that shaped her family and her sense of self. . . . A haunting, captivating memoir of homecoming.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“This heartfelt exploration of the intersections between geography, history, and identity mesmerizes.”—Publishers Weekly

“From the deep labyrinths of the Balkan past, Kapka Kassabova has returned with another hoard of extraordinary lives, tales of survival, dark comedy, and horror. Humanity glitters under her gaze in all its facets. Her prose is spectacularly good and her storytelling is a joy.”—Philip Marsden

From the Publisher

★ 2020-06-03
A writer from the Balkans revisits the region's tumultuous past.

An award-winning writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, Kassabova, who was born in Bulgaria, is the fourth generation of women to leave the Balkan region around lakes Ohrid and Prespa, encompassing North Macedonia and Albania. In lyrical, radiant prose, the author recounts her journey to the lakes in a quest to understand the historical forces that shaped her family and her sense of self and to seek “continuity of being through continuity of place.” From her moment of arrival, Kassabova felt an uncanny connection to Ohrid, her grandmother’s home city, and “an exhilaration of wholeness” beside the glistening, ancient lake whose shores had been inhabited for 8,000 years. “Whose are you?” was a repeated refrain from many she met. Complicating that question about family heritage, Kassabova also asked, “What is a nation? What is geography?” The region, “still a bastion of Eastern hedonism and puritanism,” had a violent past: Ottoman colonization, religious conflicts, wars, resistance, desperate escapes, and “the ravages of a decayed autocracy [that] resulted in civil collapse and the rule of banditry.” Albania suffered for three decades under brutal communist totalitarianism. Through the many people she met—many, in fact, relatives—Kassabova chronicles the region’s history and culture, evoking songs, folk tales, poetry, myths, and superstitions. Ranging over “a traumatized topography,” she reveals her own profound inner journey. “My whole life,” she writes, “felt like a bid to break away from the grip of my predecessors with their endless grievances, step after step, road after travelled road—as if awakening and seeing the light of the Lake for the first time.” As she examines her responses to “a lost homeland I was slowly remembering,” the question that gnawed at her was not “Whose are you?” but rather, “Whose life are you living? No, really living.”

A haunting, captivating memoir of homecoming.

Kirkus Reviews