5 Days in Ohrid

Start where the smell of the morning is: a bakery. Ohridski gevrek is the town's ring-shaped bread, closer to a bagel than a roll, and Ohrid bakers have their own version. Most bakeries in the Old Town sell it, and many open very early.

Eat it the local way, with plain yogurt or a glass of peach juice. It's cheap, it's filling, and you're about to climb a hill, so skip the heavy hotel breakfast.

The first stop is the best set of frescoes in town. The Church of the Holy Mother of God Perivleptos, known locally as St. Clement's, was built and painted in 1295 by two painters, Michael and Eutychios, for a patron who was a son-in-law of the Byzantine emperor. It served as Ohrid's second cathedral and held the relics of St. Clement until 2002, when they were carried up to Plaošnik, where you'll go on day two. The walls are covered in saints in deep blue and red, and it's the church guides send people to first.

Across the courtyard, the Icon Gallery sits in a school building from the 1840s. The museum institute behind it holds more than 2,000 icons from the 11th to the 19th century, and this is where they're shown. It's small and quiet, so an hour is plenty.

Walk up through the Upper Gate to Samuel's Fortress, which crowns the hill. The walls once ran for about 3 km around the old town. The oldest layer is older than anything else you'll see in town: the ancient historian Polybius says Philip II of Macedon ordered a fort built on this hill. Most of the medieval walls and towers date from the time of Tsar Samuel, who ruled until 1014 and made Ohrid his capital. Bulgarian and Macedonian historiography disagree about his state: the first treats it as the western part of the First Bulgarian Empire, the second as a Macedonian Slavic state. Large-scale conservation and restoration of the walls and towers began in 2000, so part of what you walk on is new.

The enclosed area is mostly open ground. The reward is the walk along the ramparts and the view over the roofs and the lake, so don't expect rooms to explore.

Walk back down to the Ancient Theatre, right by the Upper Gate. It was built around 200 BC and is the only Hellenistic-type theatre in North Macedonia, since the others, in Skopje, Stobi and Heraclea, are Roman. After the Roman conquest it was adapted to host gladiator fights. Some of the stone seats still carry the names of the two city leaders who rented them, Krisp and Topos, which is the most human detail in town.

Plays and concerts have been held here again since 2001, and it's one of the stages of the Ohrid Summer Festival in July and August. In October the seats are empty. Sit on the stones and look out over the lake.

Ohrid's cathedral for centuries, the Church of St. Sophia stands on the foundations of earlier churches, and the building you see is mostly from the 11th century. The interior keeps frescoes from the 11th to the 13th century, among the most important Byzantine paintings in the Balkans. The grand porch with its towers was added in the 14th century. In the second half of the 15th century the church became a mosque, the frescoes were covered with lime and a minaret was added; they were uncovered again after World War II.

The acoustics are famous, and the church and its courtyard are still used for concerts. Ask locally whether the early Christian basilica at Mančevci, excavated in 2007 inside the old town, can be visited. It has a fairly well preserved mosaic floor.

Antiko is a restaurant in an old Ohrid mansion in the middle of the Old Town, and it's the standard place to try classic Macedonian cooking. Start with a Shopska salad (šopska salata) and share a clay pot of tavče gravče, the baked white beans in paprika and onion that count as the national dish.

If the tavče gravče isn't on the menu, ask what comes out of the clay pot that day. A bottle of local red goes well with it, and the Old Town is also the place to get your first taste of rakija, the fruit brandy that arrives as a welcome.

Walk down to the lakefront, where the square of St. Clement meets the water. The quay is the town's living room, with cafes along the water and the old walls above. It's free, and the best way to end the first day.

Sunset is around 6:10pm in early October, about 5:45pm by the 24th, and the clocks go back on Sunday 25 October, after which the sun sets at about 4:40pm. If you want to see the light on the lake, go before dinner; after dinner you get the lit-up walls and the cafes.

The Robev Family House on Tsar Samoil Street is the best way to see what money looked like in 19th-century Ohrid. The Robev brothers built a house here in 1827, and in 1861 it was burned down by Ustref Bey, a notorious local figure. They rebuilt it between 1861 and 1863 as a double house, one half for each brother's family, under the woodcarver Todor Petkov. According to the museum institute, the carving crews were forbidden to look at each other's work, which is why the two halves differ. The family's trade links ran from Istanbul to Vienna, Trieste and Leipzig.

Look up at the carved ceilings. The house shows archaeology, household objects and work of the Ohrid woodcarving school. Close by, the Uzunov House is the birthplace of Hristo Uzunov, a leader of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in the Ohrid region, who was born there in 1878.

Ohrid is the city of Slavic literacy, so it's fitting that someone brought papermaking back. The National Workshop for Handmade Paper is run by the family of its founder, Ljupčo Panevski. Staff make paper from pulp by hand, and a press described as a replica of a Gutenberg-style press prints on it.

You can watch for free and buy prints and cards on the paper itself, which makes them better souvenirs than most things on sale in the Old Town.

Plaošnik is the plateau between the fortress and Kaneo where, in 893, St. Clement built a church dedicated to St. Panteleimon on the foundations of an earlier basilica. It's the best claim Ohrid has to being the cradle of Slavic literacy, since this is where Clement taught and where he was buried. After the Ottoman conquest the church became a mosque. The mosque was demolished in 2000 and the church was rebuilt on the old foundations and consecrated on 11 August 2002, with the relics of St. Clement carried back from Perivleptos.

So the church is a reconstruction, and the old part is underneath it. Look at the early Christian basilica and its mosaic floors, with birds and peacocks, and in the baptistery animals coming to drink beside the four rivers of Paradise. Those floors are early Christian and are the real age of the site.

Kaneo is the old fishermen's quarter, a few stone houses and terraces squeezed under the cliff. Kaj Kanevche sits right on the water, open most of the day until midnight, and the terrace is the reason to come. It serves traditional Balkan dishes and fish, and expect prices on the high side because of the view.

Book an outside table if you want one, especially on a sunny day. If you want a cheaper lunch with the same view, buy bread and cheese and sit on the rocks near the church.

The Church of St. John at Kaneo is the picture on every postcard. It stands on a cliff above Lake Ohrid. Nobody knows exactly when it was built, only that it existed before 1447, when a property inscription mentions it, and the 13th century is the usual guess.

The inside is small and few original paintings survive, so the outside is the point. Go down the steps to the pebble beach, stand with your back to the lake and look up, and you'll see why the church became the symbol of the town.

Below the church is Kaneo Beach, a small pebble beach. Beaches here are busiest in July and August and quiet the rest of the year, which is a different experience. In October the water is cool, so plan on sitting with a coffee rather than swimming.

If you want to walk, the lakeside path from Kaneo leads back toward the center and the harbor, with viewpoints on the way.

Ohrid pearls are the town's best-known craft and its most oversold souvenir. They aren't natural pearls. They're made by hand by coating a bead in thin layers of a mixture that includes the scales of the plasica, a small silvery fish from the lake. Only two families, the Filevs and the Talevs, are said to know the method, and the story goes that a Russian emigrant brought it here in the 1920s. Accounts give 1924 or 1928, so treat the date as legend.

Go into a workshop shop such as Ohrid Pearls Filevi on Tsar Samoil Street and ask to see how the pearls are made. Anything sold on a tray on the street is likely to be an imitation bead. Buy only if you like it as jewelry, not as an investment.

About 15 km south of Ohrid, near Gradište, divers found the remains of a prehistoric village built on stilts out in the water. They counted around 6,000 wooden stakes on the lake bed, 3 to 5 meters down, which probably held up a platform with about twenty houses. The settlement is from the end of the Bronze Age and the start of the Iron Age. The finds include pottery and many animal bones, which is the usual explanation for the name.

Part of the village has been rebuilt on the water, with a museum on the shore, and the restored walls of a Roman fort stand on the hill above. It shows how old the lake's human story is. An hour is enough.

The Monastery of St. Naum was founded in 905 by Naum, a disciple of the brothers Cyril and Methodius and a colleague of Clement of Ohrid. It sits on a rise above the water about 29 km south of Ohrid, close to the Albanian border, and the area belonged to Albania from 1912 until 1925. Naum is buried inside the church. Legend says you can hear his heartbeat if you put an ear to the tomb, and visitors do try.

Rebecca West visited in 1937 and gave the monastery a chapter in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. The pilgrimage day was moved in 1720 from December to June, presumably because few pilgrims could cross the mountains in winter. Walk the grounds to the lake edge and keep your voice down inside the church.

A few minutes' walk from the monastery, the springs of the Black Drim come up out of the rock into the lake. More than a fifth of the water in Lake Ohrid is thought to arrive from Lake Prespa, on the other side of Galičica, through underground channels in the limestone, and springs like these on the eastern shore are where it comes up. The lake's only outlet is the Black Drim at Struga, which you'll see on day four, and it runs on through Albania to the Adriatic.

In season, rowboats with local boatmen take visitors out over the springs. In October, ask whether they are running before you count on them.

On the way back, stop in Trpejca, a village on the lake. Restaurants along this road are seasonal, and by mid-October several have closed for the year, so don't assume that a place you read about in July will be open.

If it's open, order what the kitchen is proudest of and keep it simple: grilled meat or baked beans with a salad. If nothing is, buy bread, cheese and a jar of ajvar at the green market in Ohrid in the morning. Autumn is when families roast the peppers and jar the relish, so it's the right season to buy it.

Struga sits where the Black Drim leaves Lake Ohrid, the lake's only outlet, and the river divides the town in two. Walk along the water and across the Bridge of Poetry. Each August the Struga Poetry Evenings gather poets there, and the festival honors Konstantin and Dimitar Miladinov, the brothers from Struga who were poets of the 19th-century national revival. The festival's winners have included several Nobel Prize laureates.

In October it's a quiet place with locals walking by the water. It's an easy hour, and the best way to see where the lake turns into a river.

The Dr. Nikola Nezlobinski Museum was founded by a Russian doctor who came to Struga in 1924 to help fight malaria. It has sections on biology, ethnology, archaeology, history and art, including mosaic floors from early Christian sites nearby.

Go for the mosaics and the local history. It's on the Drim side of town, a short walk north of the bridge, so it combines easily with the river walk, and you can skip it if you're short of time.

The riverside in Struga is lined with cafes. Sit at one, order a Macedonian coffee, and ask for gjomleze, baked layered pancakes cut into rhombuses and served with white cheese. It's a local specialty, so ask whether the cafe has it.

The coffee comes in a small copper pot and you pour it into a cup, then wait for the grounds to settle. Don't stir.

Back in Ohrid, walk the main pedestrian street of the Old Bazaar. The Ali Pasha Mosque is on it, a mosque from 1573 that was renovated in 1823 and given the name of Ali Pasha of Yanina. Its minaret had been demolished in the 1910s, and it was rebuilt with Turkish government money in a restoration finished in 2019. Some locals objected to the new, taller minaret.

The street itself is a mix of shops, jewelers and cafes, and it's where you'll see Ohrid's Muslim and Orthodox heritage side by side. Go for a walk, not a shopping trip. Many of the jewelry shops sell cheap imitation pearls, so read the pearl advice on day two before you buy.

Walk up from the bazaar to the Clock Tower, built in 1726 (the museum institute marks its 300th anniversary this year). It's small next to the clock tower in Bitola, but the setting makes up for it. Above it lies Mesokastro, the old quarter between the bazaar and the city walls.

Wander uphill without a plan. A couple of old houses still stand, and some streets open onto lake views. The two small Bolnički churches, St. Nicholas and St. Mary, are nearby and small, so ask locally whether they're open.

Kajche is a regional and fish restaurant on Ilindenska Street, just below the bazaar, and its own site gives hours of 8am to midnight every day. The menu runs long, with grilled pork and beef, salads and trout dishes, and it's an easy walk down from Mesokastro when your feet are done.

Order a šopska salata and something from the grill. Its menu lists smoked Ohrid trout, so use the rule from the food section: ask what the fish is and where it comes from before you order, and take the pork if the answer is vague.

Heraclea Lyncestis is a Roman city 2 km south of Bitola's center, founded in the 4th century BC by Philip II of Macedon, and it lay on the Via Egnatia, the Roman road to Constantinople. The theatre was built under Hadrian and wasn't discovered until 1968. The best parts are the early Christian basilicas, whose floors have mosaics of birds, trees and animals, the one in the Great Basilica narthex dates from the end of the 6th century.

Allow about an hour and a half on site. Hours and prices aren't clearly published online, so check them before you go.

Bitola was Manastır under the Ottomans, and from 1878 to 1912 it had consulates from twelve countries, which is where its nickname, the City of Consuls, comes from. In 1874 it became the center of a whole Ottoman province, and Atatürk studied at a military school here. Širok Sokak, "Wide Alley", runs from Magnolia Square to the City Park, lined with neoclassical buildings and cafes.

The clock tower is about 33 meters tall. The legend says 60,000 eggs went into the mortar. Nobody can prove it, and the first clock mechanism, from 1927, was replaced in 1936. Walk the street in one direction for the buildings and come back for a coffee.

Stop at one of the pastry shops (slatkarnica) for tulumba, the fried ridged dough soaked in sugar syrup that came from the Ottomans and is sold in every bakery in the country. Eat it hot, with a coffee, and expect it to be very sweet.

A good tulumba is crisp outside and soft inside. If it's soggy and cold, move on to the next shop.

The Museum of Bitola is on Kliment Ohridski Street at the south end of Širok Sokak. Its site lists 8am to 6pm from October to March and 8am to 8pm from April to October, so in October check on the day. A ticket for foreign visitors costs 180 MKD, and entry is free for everyone on the first day of each month.

The museum also has a memorial room for Atatürk, who studied in the city. If your time is short, walk the street, have the pastry and skip the museum.

The cafes along Širok Sokak are made for people-watching. Take a table, order a coffee or a Skopsko beer, and watch the street. It's a better use of the last hour than another museum.

Check the last bus back to Ohrid before you sit down, and leave the street in good time. The ride takes about an hour and a half.