The underrated European country that's sure to improve your health
Tickly cough? Runny nose? Broken sleep? For a fast and effective remedy, try Macedonia.
A visit to the pharmacy has never been more delightful. Clearly, nobody loves scouring the aisles of plasters, paracetamol and Preparation H in Boots. But on the wildflower-spangled slopes of Mount Pelister in southern Macedonia, I found myself hiking through Europe’s most alluring al-fresco apothecary store.
The meandering trail climbing from the little village of Nizepole, you see, is lined with the delicate pink blooms of lemon thyme, effective for alleviating insomnia. Mix with cowslips, gleaming yolk-yellow among tufty alpine grass, for a tea to soothe those sniffs and wheezes. Pluck a handful of plump, indigo-black berries from shrubby dwarf junipers to settle a dodgy tummy. And if your cough still niggles, try the time-tested local treatment.
“Pick a few green Molika pine cones,” advised my softly spoken mountain guide, Jonce Ilievski. “Snap them and layer with honey in a glass jar. After 40 days you’ll have a soothing cough syrup.” And if the herbs and berries don’t sort you out, the pristine air, soul-soaring views and swathes of flowers – Pelister’s pink and lilac saffron, knapweed and violet, bellflower and cyclamen – will soon have you feeling in the pink.
I hadn’t come to Pelister National Park – first in the former Yugoslavia, designated in 1948 to protect those endemic Molika pines – for health reasons, of course. I was testing a new walking tour in the craggy Republic of Macedonia, whose trails remain largely unsung while erstwhile nation-mates such as Slovenia attract the hiking hordes. It’s surely only a matter of time till that changes, though: Macedonia’s credentials as a lakes-and-mountains hotspot are exemplary, and augmented by fascinating historic relics befitting a major cultural crossroads.
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Berries and wild herbs aren’t the only tastes of note here, as I learned on the drive from Skopje airport towards Pelister. Pausing for lunch at Stobi Winery, the fruits of fine soils and 260 annual days of sunshine emerged: Cab Sav, Merlot, Riesling and excellent oaked Chardonnays, plus older regional varietals. There was Rkaciteli, an ancient white from Georgia; Vrane? (‘black stallion’), a traditional dark tipple; and strong red Krato?ija, so long-established that – so joked local guru Gorki Balojani – “Alexander the Great probably drank it.”
Ah, The Alex Question. At school you were probably taught that the serial conqueror was Greek – yet in the 4th century BC there was no Greek nation per se. No, Alexander was Macedonian; the question is where exactly ‘Macedonia’ was. Today’s Greeks insist it was on their patch, demanding that their neighbour drops the moniker and sparking a long-running dispute with the former Yugoslav republic – a situation that hit the headlines again this month with the signing of a cross-border deal that could see this nation renamed the Republic of North Macedonia and lift Greek objections to its membership of both EU and Nato.
What’s incontrovertible is the impact of Alexander’s dad, Philip, who laid the foundations not only of the conqueror’s great empire but of a metropolis now lying just north of the modern Greek border. The archaeological site of Heraclea Lyncestis reflects Philip’s reputed heritage – he claimed descent from Greek demigod Heracles, while his mother Eurydice was of the Lyncestis tribe dwelling beneath Mount Pelister. Divine ancestry or no, his legacy here is memorable: a hotchpotch of Hellenic ruins, a magnificent Greek-cum-Roman arena (“The acoustics are still amazing – ancient Dolby surround sound!”, quipped Gorki) and gorgeous early Christian mosaics. At its peak Heraclea’s population topped 20,000, before its destruction by earthquake in AD 518; today much awaits excavation. As Gorki wryly observed: “Macedonia is one huge archaeological site – everywhere you dig, you uncover fortresses, towns, tombs, marbles.”
After the quake, the populace resettled a mile or two north to what’s now Bitola, Macedonia’s cosmopolitan second city and my first night’s stop. Long an important staging post on the Via Egnatia, the major road linking Thessaloniki with Rome, Bitola retains hints of its Ottoman pomp around broad ?irok Sokak (‘Wide Street’), still the see-and-be-seen café culture artery. Though the influence of Islam is less dominant today, it’s still evident what enchanted poet and painter Edward Lear on his 1848 odyssey through the Balkans: “A more magnificently placed city it is hardly possible to imagine, and the great quantity of cypress and plane setting off its delicate white and pink mosque is wonderfully beautiful… Interest and beauty in profusion, O ye artists!”
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Lear didn’t relish his journey west across Pelister (“its monotonous features were gloomy with dark and lowering clouds,” he griped), but he missed a trick by not tackling the trails on foot. My climb up the peak’s flanks was garnished not just with wildflowers and herbs but also candy-sweet wild strawberries, butterflies like confetti, and ‘Pelister Eyes’, a pair of alpine tarns alongside which we munched a mountain of packed lunch. That afternoon was, if anything, more rewarding: tracing a World-War-One French army track, we crossed a wild, bleakly beautiful pass to descend towards glinting Prespa Lake. Startled by our approach, a roe deer pronked out from a patch of white asphodels, and through a dense oakwood we picked our way over muddy potholes grubbed up by wild boar. Bear, lynx and wolves prowl these parts, too, though you’d be lucky indeed to spot them.
That night we refuelled in the winsome village of Brajcino with a rustic but delectable dinner comprising variations on soon-to-become-familiar themes: flat ‘pie’ baked with flaky filo pastry, red peppers stuffed and roasted into piquant ajvar relish, feta-like sirenje cheese (a three-meals-a-day mainstay in Macedonia) and the local moonshine, rakija – always rakija.
Next day we chugged across Prespa Lake to its largest isle, dozens of white pelicans lifting off as we approached. Golem Grad (‘Big City’) is a curious name for an island, especially one as compact and somnolent as this; once, though, it was a hub of empire – summer retreat of one of Macedonia’s other national heroes, Tsar Samoil, crowned king here in AD 997. Today it’s an atmospheric place to wander among the remains of Byzantine churches and Samoil’s palace, watching for trundling tortoises, water snakes and a cacophony of cormorants roosting in guano-whitened boughs.
Heading west from Prespa, the road winds up and across Gali?ica mountain to reach the viewpoint above Lake Ohrid where Lear rhapsodised: “It is scarcely possible to dream of finer scenes than these… Bright, broad and long lay the great sheet of water.” Hear hear, Ed.
The historic core of Ohrid, on the lake’s north-eastern shore, is ringed by typically forgettable communist-era blocks. Yet like Heraclea Lyncestis, it was both an important stop on the Via Egnatia and developed by Philip of Macedon in the 4th century BC. The walls of Tsar Samoil’s hilltop fortress still loom over the old town, which also boasts a Roman amphitheatre and the site of reputedly Europe’s first ‘university’, a monastic school founded in AD 893 by St Kliment, co-creator of the Cyrillic alphabet. Amid fresco-daubed Byzantine churches and stone-built merchants’ houses, cobbled alleys are lined with appealing restaurants dishing up tasty Ohrid fish: “The trout of the Lake of Akhridha are surpassingly fine,” burped Lear.
Gorki and Jonce had saved the toughest hiking challenge till last: an attempt on Mount Korab, at 2,764m the highest peak in both Macedonia and Albania, its summit shared between both. The drive to the trailhead in Mavrovo National Park is an adventure in itself, negotiating a succession of increasingly dramatic and claustrophobic gorges and climaxing with the rough track that snakes along the Radika valley to the border post at Strezimir. Our packs weighed down with chicken, salad, bread and – naturally – sirenje cheese, we ascended through magical silver birch forest ringing with the song of a gushing burn. Soon we emerged onto steep meadows where a volley of barks and growls alerted us to a nearby posse of baying hounds, recalling Lear’s fretful observation that “large herds of goats browsingly wandered among the stunted herbage under the guarding care of ferocious dogs”.
A word from Jonce to the dogs’ master soon gained us a pass up to wilder upper reaches where the lilac hues of saffron and violets echoed purple-veined marble slabs on the path. Above a broad saddle where horses grazed as their Albanian owners gathered camomile, we crested a ridge to be rewarded with the panoramic prize: vistas of a fanged ridge spanning the entire western horizon, bookended by the craggy, leaning slab of Korab. Here our way was blocked by steep snow tongues, their crust of avalanche detritus warning us of the foolhardiness of a traverse so early in June. No matter: the panorama was sensational enough to sate my taste for high drama.
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The following evening Gorki led me through the recently glamorised boulevards of capital Skopje, past a phalanx of recently erected statues designed to evoke past glories (the ambiguously named ‘Warrior on a Horse’ might easily be mistaken for Alexander the Great) to the old Ottoman bazaar. Here, as we delved into an old khan (caravanserai) now housing a charming traditional restaurant, I spotted the national flag fluttering on high: a stylised yellow sun with eight spreading rays – a sign, perhaps, that this beguiling Balkan corner is ready to emerge from the shadows of its more-touristed neighbours and shine once more. And why not? As Edward Lear declared: “Of many days passed in many lands, in wandering amid noble scenery, I can recall none more variously delightful and impressive than this has been.”
How to visit Macedonia
Paul Bloomfield was a guest of Walks Worldwide (01962 302085; walksworldwide.com) on its new Trails of Macedonia itinerary. The guided small-group trek costs from ￡1,399, including seven nights’ full-board accommodation and local transport but not flights. Departs September 15 and October 6 2018. WizzAir (wizzair.com) flies London Luton-Skopje from ￡22.99 each way.