Lake of Sharks
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
62
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Ohrid,
Macedonia
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Ohrid is a fascinating city. Does anyone out there remember Tintin and the Lake of Sharks? This is the city in it! In the story, there is a landlocked lake with two backwards police regimes on the lookout for each other (like Albania and Yugoslavia in the Cold War era). Lake Ohrid is about fifteen kilometers wide, thirty long and the border runs right down the middle. On a clear day, it is easy to see the other side, because the lake is in an ancient crater and hills rise around it on all sides. In that story, there is a submarine in the lake, and we talked about if one would bother with putting a submarine in a landlocked lake. Critics panned the story, but I think that I found the place of its inspiration. But enough about Tintin.
On a hill in Ohrid town is the ancient church of Sveti Maria (Saint Mary). Some call it Sveti Kliment, for at a time one of his bones was kept here, but it has since been taken away to a monastery elsewhere on the lake. The church of Sveti Maria has a small booth from which one can buy icons, and a guided tour costs only two dollars. It is a small church, too, but it is peculiar. Many churches have paintings on their walls, but not many are painted with images from the stories of apocrypal gospels*. The Gospel of Jacob must have been a favourite here, for its stories adorn the walls.
All these we learned from a Ph D candidate who was possibly also named Maria. Her real name has been lost in the synapses of my mind. She speaks English in a Slavic metre and very loudly. Perhaps it was the setting and the echo of the walls, or the air may have been too fresh to properly conduct sound, but whatever it was some of the story was heard only by the walls.
Sveti Maria's church was painted at a time shortly after the Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. Many talented painters who painted there were unemployed, and many of them came to the Balkans, some to Ohrid. At the same time, the Orthodox church was not at its strongest and church dogma in the provinces was not being rigourously enforced. The result was that the people who painted Sveti Maria painted what they wanted to paint.
The passion of the Christ adorns the walls, but so does the life story of St. Mary. The visitation by the angel Gabriel and her sorrow at the foot of the cross, you guess? That is some of it. But did you know that Mary was born like John, to very old parents?
Here is the rest of the story: Her parents were also visited by wise men who told of a great future for Mary. The kind man Joseph, a carpenter, was also on the scene. He heard of her great destiny and when she was twelve, he offered to take her into his safe keeping. He heard that she was to bear a child immaculately, but he also knew that a single woman having a baby was not an acceptable thing. So, he being a widow married her and kept her as his own child.
But he had no "relations" with her. He died soon after Jesus was born. That's why he hardly figures in the Bible: Mary had the baby Jesus but was never touched by a man in that reproductive way. Those who were known as Jesus' siblings were Joseph's children but not Mary's. The painting sequence ends with Mary's death and ascension. Our tour guide told us that to her, the Gospel of Jacob is as true as the Bible. Truer, even.
As we were leaving, she showed us her Ph D treatise. It has been bound and very soon would it be submitted to her professors, who would grant her a doctorate. We wished her luck. Hopefully those prof's don't bring up that Joseph and Mary had to go to Bethlehem to register in a census without any of Joseph's other children... Certainly the Patriarch at Constinapole in 1452 would have raised an objection to the painting of this story, but maybe Maria's professors will be preoccupied with another probable Turkish invasion.
Entirely by chance, later that afternoon, Bro and I ran into the student from Michigan. The three of us explored the castle of Ohrid, which rises above the lake on a hill across from Sveti Maria. It is pretty much a ruin, although the imposing walls have been recently restored. Lizards scamper through the cracks in the walls and between the weeds underfoot. In one roped off but unsupervised area, someone piled two hundred 12 lb stone cannonballs in the sand. What could one do but practice the shot put? Nearby was some ancient pottery and it was just asking to be shattered. There was no question about it, so I smashed it to smithereens.
*apocrypal gospels are works about Jesus but have not been included in the Christian Bible.
**Turkey is not currently threating Macedonia with invasion, as far as I know.
***Naturally you must be horrified to learn that I broke ancient pottery. Seriously though, there is enough of it around. All that stuff breaks eventually anyways. Actually, the pottery was not ancient by anymeans and nearly completely smashed anyway. A closer examination of it, before we picked up cannonballs, showed that it was factory manufactured within the last few years and already deliberately smashed by someone else. Sorry for the let down. I just wanted to say something inflamatory.
