North Macedonia: Ohrid and Skopje

We left our heroes on a cold morning trying to hitchhike from Florina to Bitola. Turned out to be quite easy. We got our first ride before even leaving the town of Florina. A student took us to the university at the edge of the populated area. From there we walked for perhaps over an hour before a friendly local gave us a ride all the way to Bitola. He spoke both Greek and Macedonian, but no English or Turkish.

It isn’t all that crazy to expect Turkish out here. There are Turkish-speaking villages just over the border in North Macedonia, and in fact the Macedonian border guard spoke Turkish. Crossing the border was so easy we didn’t even have to get out of the car!

We were dropped at the bus station in Bitola, and immediately a bus was leaving for Ohrid. The next one was about seven hours later so we left Bitola right away even though we had wanted to see the Atatürk exhibit at the local museum. At Atatürk’s birth house in Thessaloniki we had learned that he attended a military academy in Bitola (aka Manastır), something I hadn’t realized on my first visit to Bitola.

Our original plan after Thessaloniki was to go to Kavala and hop on ferries to İzmir (Çeşme?). Bektaş somehow learned that one-way tickets from Skopje to Antalya were going for 70 euro. Heck, that’s less than we’d be spending on ferries, and isn’t Oliver staying in Ohrid now? We could visit him as well! Turns out the flight tickets were only 60 euro, and Oliver said, yes, come visit. He was waiting at the Ohrid bus station for us.

I visited North Macedonia only 18 months earlier for the first time and went to both Ohrid and Skopje. Somehow I’ll try to make this blog a little different from that one. I might fail, however, so you can stop here if you’re tired of picturesque Ohrid photos.

Kind of looks like Kaleiçi, doesn’t it?

Ohrid is all about the churches. Holy Mary Peribleptos Church may have some of the best frescoes.

We came across friendly women in 14th century St. Bogorodica-Chelnica:

Church St. Bogorodica Bolnichka is another one we got inside.

St. Sophia Church was my favorite from my first visit.

For the view it’s hard to beat St. John Kaneo Church.

If you like the frescoes, Oliver recommends visiting Boyana Church near Sofia. For me the best were at the Visoki Dečani Monastery in western Kosovo.

For an out of town excursion we rented a car one day. Our first stop was Struga, another lakeside town.

We had a decent lunch in Vevchani and enjoyed walking a bit in the foothills there.

Our favorite though was driving over the mountains on the east side of Lake Ohrid and then descending to Lake Prespa, another gem.

A bit of trivia: Lake Prespa seems to be one of four lakes in the world in exactly three countries — North Macedonia, Albania, and Greece in this case. Lake Malawi, Lake Victoria, and Lake Constance are the others. The only one I haven’t visited is the latter!

We enjoyed the view from Stenje:

Ferda and I said goodbye to Oliver. He was off to Morocco via Albania just a day or two after we left and is in Colombia as I’m writing this. That guy gets around. Ferda and I spent one night in Skopje before the red eye to Antalya.

We took a city tour in the afternoon and learned that the Greeks claim Alexander the Great as their own and the Albanians claim Mother Theresa. There’s no one left for the Macedonians our guide joked.