“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature,” reads the epigraph to Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace. “It is Earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” The quotation is from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden of 1854, often borrowed cheaply as a shortcut for performative environmentalism or transcendentalism – but in this case, it works. It is a fitting description of what the Bulgarian-born writer Kassabova sets out to do; confront the real and symbolic significance of these vast pools of human reflection.
As with her previous work Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe – an observant account of the ancient region of Thrace, now split between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece – To the Lake takes a tripartite landmass as its subject. This time, Kassabova journeys into the snow-capped mountains of Albania, North Macedonia and Greece flanked by the Adriatic and Aegean seas. Embedded in this rugged topography are two lakes – Ohrid and Prespa – uniquely connected by underground streams. Between one- and three-million years old, the lakes belong to an ancient timescale; memories of Macedonian, Illyrian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and communist civilisations are mere flickers on their cosmic consciousness.
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