PRESPA - WHERE THREE COUNTRIES MEET

I have been passionately interested in Albania since about 1965. Until 1984, when I visited Albania, I spent a great deal of time visiting places from which I could catch even a distant glimpse of the country. One of these places was the area containing the Prespa lakes in the north-western corner of Greece. There are two of these lakes: the Small and the Great Prespa lakes. The smaller one shares its waters between Greece (mainly) and Albania. The larger one shares its waters with Greece, Albania, and FYROM (formerly the Yugoslav Macedonia). The lakes are separated from each other by a thin strip of land, which is currently Greek territory.

Heading west along the strip of land separating 

the Great Prespa Lake (right) from the Small Prespa Lake (left)

In 1977, I visited the Prespa area with my parents in a chauffeur driven car. We left the main road that connects Florina with Kastoria somewhere near to the village of Vigla and joined a winding rough surfaced mountainous side-road that led more or less in a western direction. A few metres along it, we had to stop at a police post. An official recorded our car registration and our names in a huge old-fashioned ledger, and then allowed us to proceed. We had just entered the sensitive border area of Greece close to Albania.

Map of the Prespa lakes area showing places mentioned in this article.

(The arrows show my approximate itinerary in 1977).

In 1977, Albania and Greece were still technically at war with each other. One of the causes of this was the Albanian claim that northern Epirus (Çamëria, in Albanian) should be returned to the ethnic Albanians, who had been expelled from it. I get the impression that the problem remains unresolved even today, at least in the minds of some Albanians.

Aghios Germanos

The road we followed wound through wild mountainous terrain. Eventually, we arrived in the tiny village of Aghios Germanos. It had a deserted appearance as we stared at it in the midday sun. Nobody was about. From there we made our way to the neck of land that separates the two Prespa lakes. We stopped along it to have lunch - I believe that we ate fish -at a small restaurant.

The strip of land separating Great Lake Prespa (in the background) from Little

Lake Prespa. Adam Yamey is on the right of the group in the photo.

From where we stopped, we could see the peaks of Albanian mountains in one direction.

Great Lake Prespa. The distant headland in the right third of the picture 

and the barely visible mountains behind it are in Albania.

And, in the other direction we could see the distant hills of Macedonia.

Great Lake Prespa looking east towards the mountains of Macedonia (FYROM)

As we drove away from Great Prespa, we began to get good views of Little Prespa

Little Lake Prespa

We left the Prespa lakes region by way of a different road from that which we arrived there. We rejoined the main road that connects Florina with Kastoria near to the village of  Trigono, where we stopped because I wanted to take a photograph of the monument whose illustration appears at the beginning of this article. 

Trigono village

I had completely forgotten that I had taken this picture in 1977, and only rediscovered it this April (2014).  The simple monument in white stone bears an inscription, which I have illustrated below:

My rudimentary knowledge of the modern Greek alphabet allowed me to decipher the subject's name as "Skountris Emmannou??"  In vain, I searched for this name or variations of it on the Internet. Next, I wrote to  my relatively new acquaintance Professor Christina Koulouri in Athens. She told me that this statue was put up in memory of a Cretan volunteer, Emmanouil  Skountris. Furthermore, she informed me that he was a Greek fighter during the 'Macedonian Struggle' (1903-1908). 

In brief and at the risk of gross oversimplification, the Greeks were fighting the Bulgarians to gain control of Ottoman Macedonia. There is very little about Emm. Skountris on the internet, but what follows is what I have managed to discover so far.

Trigono is known as 'Osčima' by the Bulgarians.  On the 14th September 1904, Greek rebels led by the Cretan Efthimios Kaoudis fought with Bulgarian rebels at Trigono.  The Greeks won this battle, but amongst the injured was Emmanouil Skountris. 

A Bulgarian web-site ( click  here)  contains six lines of text about Skountris as well as the picture reproduced above. Using a computerised translator and a little common sense, this is what they say: 

"Emmanuel Skundris Adele was born in Crete. He entered the ranks of the Greek propagandists in Macedonia in 1904, joining the the band of Evtimios Kaudis. He took part in the fighting near Kostenariyata and was slightly wounded at the Battle of Oshtima on September 14, 1904"

The variations of spelling are to be expected when transliterating from one alphabet to another. I found another picture of Skountris in a Greek  website (click here). In this illustration, he is shown mounted:

When I took the picture of his monument back in 1977, I did so because I was attracted by the naivety of its sculptural style. At the time, I doubt that I even noticed the inscription below the bust. I only spotted it 37 years later!  Now that I have seen photographs of Skountris, I realise that far from being naive, this sculpture is a very realistic representation of its subject.

What intrigues me is that this little monument in a tiny Greek village encapsulates the problems that have plagued the Balkan peninsula. Trigono was once just a small place in the large Ottoman Empire. Then, as this empire began to disintegrate at the end of the 19th century, it like so many other places began to be contested by the nations that evolved from the smouldering embers of the empire. Skountris is remembered because he helped to wrest the area from the rival Bulgarians. But, others in neighbouring states may still be looking hungrily at the area around Trigono and the Prespa lakes,  where the borders of three countries now meet. Let us hope that whatever the aspirations of those who feel that the borders have been incorrectly drawn, peace will continue to reign in the area.

This article has been written by 

Adam Yamey, who has published two books about the Balkans:

"Albania on my Mind"

&;

"Scrabble with Slivovitz"

Details of these books may be found by clicking

HERE!

AM I A CAMERA?

I knew that I had them. I knew where these foolscap (not even A4) pages were stored, stuffed into the pages of an old road atlas of Yugoslavia. But, I believed that they contained little more information than the list of places that I had visited with a friend when we drove around Serbia in 1990, the last time that I visited Yugoslavia. I was under the impression that the notes contained only the itinerary that we had followed when we visited lesser-known places in the heart of Yugoslavia, a country that was soon to be torn apart by uncivil civil wars.

However, when I did eventually take a look at these papers more than 20 years after having written them, I realised that I was wrong. These pages contained much more than a simple listing of where we had been and on which day; they contained extremely detailed notes about what we did at each of these places. At the insistence of the Yugoslav friend with whom I had made this trip in May 1990 I had kept a detailed contemporaneous record of our Serbian 'odyssey'.

I re-read these notes whilst I was working on the finishing touches to my book about Albania, "Albania on my mind", and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to write something about the numerous trips that I made to Yugoslavia between about 1967 and 1990. Thus, the idea of writing "Scrabble with Slivovitz - Once upon a time in Yugoslavia"  (which I shall now abbreviate to 'SWS') was born. At first, I thought of writing up my 1990 notes into a short book, but soon after this I decided that I would trawl through my memories and try to write about the decades of experiences that I gleaned from visiting Yugoslavia.

I knew that I had taken many photographs during my numerous visits to ths country and its neighbours, but I had not seen them for over 20 years. They were all colour transparencies taken on 35 mm film. When I moved house in about 1993, all of these pictures were placed, along with many other surplus goods, into a lock-up in a warehouse a long way from where I moved in with my wife. I had no idea what condition they were in and what was depicted on them. Consequently, most of the text of SWS was based on what memories that remained stored in my aging brain. The only part of the book that was based on more than pure memory was my description of the last trip that I made to Yugoslavia (that was in May 1990).

Just when the manuscript of SWS was nearly ready for publication, the company which managed the long-term storage of our goods contacted us urgently. The section of the warehouse in which our storage locker was located was due to be remodelled shortly. The company needed us to move our goods to a new locker, and felt that it would be best if we were present to supervise the moving. We agreed, and whilst the moving was in progress I decided to take a look at some of the numerous boxes of colour transparencies that I had not seen for over 20 years.In each box that I examined, the colour slides were in pristine condition. We returned home, and I ordered a slide scanner from Amazon. 

When the scanner arrived, I returned to our locker, and selected several boxes of slides including most of those that I had taken during my trips to Yugoslavia and its neighbours (SWS also describes excursions that I made from Yugoslavia to Bulgaria and Hungary). I scanned furiously for about 3 weeks until the scanner failed to function any more. I hasten to add that this was not due to over-use but to faulty electronics, which the supplier was gracious enough to acknowledge by making me a refund.  Since returning the scanner, I have devised my own slide scanning apparatus, which, incidentally, produces far better results than the one that I bought. I may describe its construction in a future blog.

I had originally decided to illustrate SWS with pictures 'borrowed' from the Internet, from old books and old tourist brochures in my possession, but the rediscovery of my slides made me change my mind.  I illustrated the book with my own photographs. And this is where the process of writing SWS became interesting. As I scanned the slides and turned them into digital images (.jpeg files), I realised that many of the things that I had written about, and which were based on what I could remember, were things that I had also photographed. It was if the act of taking the photograph not only made changes on the emulsion of the 35 mm camera film but also on my grey matter, or wherever it is that memories are stored in my head. Christopher Isherwood once wrote, "I am a camera...". Well, it appears that so am I!

The object of this little essay was to illustrate something of how my memory works, and I hope that I have succeeded in doing that. However, many of you may be wondering why Scrabble? Slivovitz or Slivovica almost everyone associates with the Balkans, and especially the lands which were once known as 'Yugoslavia', but few would have reason to associate Scrabble, a word game developed in the USA in 1938, with travels in the Balkans.  Well, if you want to know why I played Scrabble in Belgrade (sometimes after eating Chinese noodles in Novi Sad) as well as Sijarinska Banja and Studenica, you will have to read my book!

"SCRABBLE WITH SLIVOVITZ 

- Once upon a time in Yugoslavia"

by Adam Yamey

is available by clicking HERE

OR via Amazon's online stores, 

where it is also available as a Kindle version.