"BBC Radio 4 - Book of the week"-- Front cover.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Machine generated contents note: pt. ONE SPRING -- Ochrida hangs on a hillside -- Macedonian Girl -- Biljana washed her linens -- Whose Are You? -- Lake Ohrid -- Across the Lake -- Cirl of the waves -- One Thousand Seven Hundred Years -- I knew this rock -- The Keeper of the Black Madonna -- Swaying between joy and sorrow -- Roads -- The valley where we lived -- The Poetry and the Hunger -- We are the remnants of another age -- Besa -- The lake is a crystal -- Mountain of Bones -- pt. TWO AUTUMN -- In the village -- Poets of Pogradec -- The streaks on their faces -- Liberta -- Lake Prespa and Little Prespa -- Vale of Ghosts -- The king had goat ears -- Of Men and Islands -- I saw everything clearly now -- The Howl -- A man was tormented -- How to Heal the Insane and the Melancholy.

Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two vast lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's past, and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a civilisational crossroads. The Lakes are set within the mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and crowned by the old Roman road, the via Egnatia. Once a trading and spiritual nexus of the southern Balkans, this lake region remains one of Eurasia's most culturally diverse areas. Meanwhile, with their remote rock churches, changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the Lakes live in their own time. By exploring on water and land the stories of poets, fishermen, and caretakers, misfits, rulers, and inheritors of war and exile, Kassabova uncovers the human history shaped by the Lakes. Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy of the Lakes, Kassabova's journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.