Lake Ohrid: Deep Time, Churches and the Cultural Landscape of North Macedonia

Long before there were churches on its shores, Lake Ohrid was already ancient. According to a 2019 study based on drilling into its bed, the lake has existed continuously for some 1.36 million years, and its waters still shelter plants and animals found nowhere else. On the north-eastern shore, the town of Ohrid gathered Roman travellers, medieval scholars, archbishops and painters, and left a record of their presence in stone and fresco. On Days 12 to 14 of our Balkans small group tour through Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, the group spends three nights in Ohrid, with time to read that landscape at an unhurried pace.

Why Lake Ohrid matters on a Balkans route

It is tempting to treat Lake Ohrid as a pause in a long journey: a lakeside town, a boat trip, a free day. Yet the lake and its shore hold together several of the threads that run through the whole Balkans route. Here a Roman road crossed the mountains, Slavic letters and liturgy took root, Byzantine painters worked for archbishops, and the Ottoman centuries left their mark on the churches themselves. Beneath all of it lies a body of water far older than any of these histories.

Geography explains much of this. The Balkan peninsula is a country of mountains and narrow passes, and our article on how the land has shaped the people of the Balkans traces how relief and climate have long governed where people could settle and travel. A large lake in a mountain basin offered fresh water and fish, and people settled on its shores from prehistoric times. For the wider political story of the region, including North Macedonia’s path to statehood, see our history of the Balkans, Albania and North Macedonia. This article stays with the lake itself and the cultural landscape on its shores.

Lake Ohrid in deep time

UNESCO describes Lake Ohrid as “a deep and ancient lake of tectonic origin”, set in a basin between mountain ranges. How ancient has been a matter of research. UNESCO’s description of the World Heritage property gives an age of about two to three million years. In 2013 an international drilling project, led by Bernd Wagner of the University of Cologne, recovered sediment from the centre of the lake, drilling to 568 metres below the lake floor at a water depth of 245 metres. Its findings, published in Nature in 2019, indicated that the lake “was first established 1.36 million years ago and has existed continuously ever since”, as a University of Bristol release on the study put it. That figure is younger than the two-to-three-million-year estimate still given in UNESCO’s description, and it is the more recent result, based on direct drilling into the lake’s sediments. The University of Bristol’s release of 10 September 2019 also describes the lake as considered to be the oldest in Europe.

The sediment matters for more than a date. Laid down layer by layer, it preserves a continuous record of climate around the Mediterranean across that whole span, which is what the 2019 study set out to trace. The sediment carries that long story in a quiet form.

Lake Ohrid is large and deep. The International Lake Environment Committee’s World Lake Database gives it a surface area of 358 square kilometres, a maximum depth of 289 metres and a mean depth of 164 metres, with a shoreline of 87.5 kilometres shared between North Macedonia and Albania. Its water is replaced slowly: the same database estimates a residence time of about 70 years.

Much of that water arrives unseen. According to the World Lake Database, a little less than half comes from rivers and streams. The rest rises from springs, notably at St Naum, Drilon and Tushemisht at the southern end of the lake, and part of it travels underground through limestone channels from the Prespa basin to the east, where Lake Prespa lies about 150 metres higher. The lake drains northward near Struga into the Black Drim, which flows on towards Albania and the Adriatic.

This combination of age, depth and isolation has produced a remarkable living community. UNESCO notes that the lake holds over 200 unique species, including 17 endemic species of fish, among them two species of trout. The University of Bristol release on the 2019 study puts the number of endemic animal and plant species at more than 300. The difference reflects what is counted and when, but both make the same point: the lake has been a stable refuge long enough for species to evolve within it.

One lake, two countries: the UNESCO World Heritage listing

The lake’s natural and cultural values are recognised together. The World Heritage property now called Natural and Cultural Heritage of the Ohrid region was, in UNESCO’s words, “first inscribed for its nature conservation values in 1979 and for its cultural heritage values a year later”. It is listed under criteria (i), (iii), (iv) and (vii): three cultural criteria and one natural one, the last recognising exceptional natural beauty.

For forty years the listing covered only the part of the lake in what is now North Macedonia. In 2019 UNESCO extended the property “to include the rest of Lake Ohrid, located in Albania”, making it a transboundary site shared by the two countries. The Albanian shore brings its own heritage, including, UNESCO notes, the Early Christian church on the Lin peninsula, founded in the mid-sixth century, and further prehistoric pile-dwelling sites identified along the western margins of the lake.

The Day 13 cruise: the Bay of Bones and the monastery of Naum

On the afternoon of Day 13 the group takes a cruise across the lake to the monastery of Naum, passing the Bay of Bones, which the tour page describes as “a replica of a stick pile village built in the lake”. The reconstructed village is a direct reminder that people were living on and around Lake Ohrid long before the town above it was founded.

The site lies by the southern shore of the Gradište peninsula, near the village of Peštani. According to the Haemus centre in Skopje, underwater excavations were carried out there every year between 1997 and 2005, and some 6,000 remnants of wooden piles have been found on the lake bottom. EXARC, the international association of archaeological open-air museums, dates the settlement to the Bronze and Iron Ages, between about 1200 and 700 BC, and records the piles at a depth of three to five metres. In 2007 and 2008, Haemus notes, part of the settlement was reconstructed above the water: houses with wattle-and-daub walls on a wooden platform raised on piles. EXARC lists the site, known as the Museum on Water, as run by the institute and museum responsible for the protection of cultural monuments in Ohrid.

Above the bay, on the highest plateau of Gradište hill, stands a Roman castrum, now conserved and restored. Seen together, the reconstructed village and the fort show how long this stretch of shore has been occupied, and how differently successive peoples chose to live beside the same water.

The cruise ends at the monastery of Naum at the southern end of the lake, where the World Lake Database places some of the springs that feed it. Naum, one of the ninth-century disciples of Cyril and Methodius whose work at Ohrid is described below, is traditionally held to have founded the monastery in the early tenth century, and tradition also places his burial there. Britannica describes the Sveti Naum monastery simply as one that “overlooks Lake Ohrid”.

The setting brings deep time and church history together in a single view: springs rising from the limestone of the surrounding mountains feed a lake that was already ancient when Naum arrived. The monastery’s position on the shore, between the mountains and the water, echoes the choice made by the builders of Ohrid’s churches on the cliffs further north.

From Lykhnidos to medieval Ohrid

The town of Ohrid owes part of its early importance to a road. Britannica records that the settlement, a Greek colony called Lykhnidos in Classical antiquity, had become by the second century BCE a post on the Via Egnatia, the Roman road that crossed the southern Balkans; the tour follows that road into Albania on Day 15.

The town of Ohrid grew on a crag on the north-eastern shore, and its layout still reflects that rise from the waterfront to the summit. Its medieval importance came in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, when Ohrid was the seat of Tsar Samuel, the period to which Britannica dates the fortress on the hilltop. After the Byzantine emperor Basil II took Ohrid (in 1019/20, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, as cited by the Byzantine Legacy research site), the town remained the seat of an archbishopric. In the thirteenth century the town was contested between neighbouring powers, and it passed under Ottoman rule at the end of the fourteenth century; the same source gives 1394.

Those changes of rule are written into the fabric of the town’s churches, as the story of Sveta Sophia shows. Before the painters and the conquerors, though, came the teachers.

Clement, Naum and a centre of Slavic learning

Ohrid’s reputation as a place of learning begins in the ninth century. Britannica records that in 886 the Bulgarian ruler Boris I gave asylum to Clement, Nahum (Naum) and Angelarius, disciples of the missionaries Cyril and Methodius who had been driven out of Moravia, and that with his support they founded centres of Slavic learning at Pliska, Preslav and Ohrid. Clement, Britannica notes, opened a Slavic school of higher learning at Ohrid, trained a large number of Slavs for the ministry and became bishop of Ohrid.

The Byzantine Legacy cautions that some of this tradition rests on later evidence: Archbishop Theophylaktos, who died in 1108, wrote that around 900 the city was a centre of St Clement’s building activity, but no independent source confirms it. Britannica records that on a nearby hilltop the Imaret, a Turkish mosque and inn, was built on the foundations of the ninth-century monastery of St Panteleimon, associated with St Clement. The layering of Christian and Ottoman foundations on a single hill is typical of how Ohrid’s history accumulated rather than replaced itself.

Sveta Sophia and its eleventh-century wall paintings

The short tour on Day 13 stops at the Sveta Sophia church, which, as the tour page notes, has wall paintings dating from the 11th century. Britannica describes St Sophia’s as having frescoes from the 11th to the 14th century. According to CyArk, the heritage documentation organisation that recorded the church in detail, the paintings were commissioned by Archbishop Leo of Ohrid and reflect his Eastern Orthodox beliefs; across the building, CyArk writes, they document four centuries of achievement in Byzantine art.

The church’s later history explains why the paintings survive in the condition they do. After Ohrid came under the Ottoman Empire, CyArk records, the building was converted into a mosque and its frescoes were plastered over. The plaster hid the paintings for centuries, and they are visible again today. The same pattern appears elsewhere in the town: Britannica notes that the church of St Clement, dated 1295, has medieval frescoes that were uncovered in the 1950s.

UNESCO counts the frescoes of Ohrid’s churches among the reasons for the region’s listing, describing painted surfaces of more than 2,500 square metres and a collection of more than 800 Byzantine-style icons. Seeing even one of these interiors makes clear why the town’s cultural value was recognised so soon after the lake’s natural value.

How much walking is involved on the Ohrid days?

The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate. The tour page states that participants must be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, be in good health and mobile, and take part in 3 to 5 hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. Ohrid’s old town rises from the lakeshore to the hilltop fortress, so if you would like to talk through the pace of these days, a Tour Specialist can help.

Is there time to rest during the Ohrid stay?

Yes. The tour page describes Day 13 as primarily a rest day, with a short tour in Ohrid that takes in a museum with displays of the archaeology of the region and the Sveta Sophia church, followed by the afternoon cruise. Day 14 is set aside as a free day to explore the town or relax at your own pace.

The old town, the theatre and the lakeside promenade

On the free day, the tour page suggests visiting the Roman amphitheatre, walking through the old town, or taking in the promenade beside the lake. Each offers a different way of reading the place. The old town’s lanes climb between houses with projecting upper storeys, and churches appear at turns in the streets and on the cliffs above the water.

The theatre is a reminder of the town’s Classical past. From its stone tiers the view opens over the red roofs of the old town to the water, and the layers of the town’s history can be read in a single glance: the ancient seating, the medieval churches, the houses of later centuries and the lake beyond.

The lakeside promenade, by contrast, turns attention back to the water. Here the scale of the lake becomes apparent, with the mountains of the far shore. It is a fitting place to recall that the clear water lapping the quay may have entered the lake decades ago, and that the basin itself has held water for more than a million years.

What does the group see on the way to Ohrid?

Day 12 is a travel day with two visits. The group leaves Skopje for Tetovo to visit the Arabati Baba Bektasi Teke with a local guide. The route then heads south through the mountains and forests to the large complex of the St John Bigorski monastery, which, as the tour page puts it, “also claims to hold the forearm of John the Baptist”, before continuing to Ohrid.

Where does the route go after Ohrid?

On Day 15 the group leaves Ohrid and follows the route of the ancient Via Egnatia into Albania and over the mountains, stopping at Mirake to see a bridge the tour page describes as possibly Roman, and at Elbasan to see the castle. The day ends with a guided walking tour of the citadel at Berat, whose history we explore in our article on Berat in southern Albania.

Reading Lake Ohrid as a cultural landscape

UNESCO’s decision to list Ohrid for both natural and cultural values captures something visitors feel on the shore: the two are not separate. The lake’s depth, its springs and its endemic life are the setting for every human chapter that followed, from the pile dwellings of the Bronze Age to the Roman road, the schools of Clement and Naum, the painted churches of the archbishops and the mosques and houses of the Ottoman centuries. The 2019 extension to Albania recognised that this landscape does not stop at a modern border.

Travelling as a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, mature travellers reach Ohrid on Day 12, after Skopje and before the Albanian stage of the route. Three nights on the shore, with one short tour, a cruise and a free day, give enough time to look closely, and to see a lake more than a million years old as the thread that ties the place together.