Today, Voskopojë is a pleasant village in a small valley surrounded by fir-covered mountains.
The town flourished for a century before being sacked by Ali Pasha, a warlord known as “the Muslim Bonaparte”, at the end of the 18th century, after which it sank into near obscurity. In the mountains west of Korçë they built their own miniature Oxford, complete with an academy, printing presses and ornate churches. Also known as Moschopolis, or the “city of shepherds”, it was once the unofficial capital of the Vlachs, an often (but not exclusively) nomadic people who spoke a language similar to Romanian. I had come to Korçë to see the remains of Voskopojë. I settled down for a plate of lamb qebap and Greek salad (“village salad” here – nationalism dies hard) and listened to a free concert by French indie-pop singer Clio. By nightfall, the bazaar was teeming with people dining outdoors at Italian trattorias and Albanian qebaptorë. Arriving at noon, the city seemed deserted. After fortifying myself with a cappuccino by the lakefront, I got on a bus for Korçë, the cultural capital of Albania’s stark eastern highlands. A quick cab ride from the frontier to the nearby town of Pogradec was enough to dispel any lingering anxieties. My entry point was one of the most beautiful border crossings I’ve ever experienced, a wild stretch of shoreline along Lake Ohrid where Albania meets North Macedonia. The view of the valley from the church porch stretched for miles, all the way to the Tomorr massif, Albania’s Mount Fuji Even though much time has passed since then, I wasn’t sure what I would find. But I’m also old enough to remember images broadcast from Albania after the fall of communism and the civil war that swept over the country in 1997. I’m Polish, and I’ve been travelling through the region long enough to have experienced every kind of basic material discomfort. You could chalk that up to what the Bulgarian scholar Maria Todorova called “nested Balkanisms”: the tendency of every eastern European country to regard itself as the golden mean, and look at its neighbours (especially to the south and east) with suspicion.
I felt trepidation before my first visit there in 2019.
0 kommentar(er)
