Letter From Hamsher’s Ohrid

I was earlier than I needed to be at the Skopje International Airport, so I settled into a chair overlooking the airfield and carried on with my book: W. Papel Hamsher’s The Balkans by Bicycle.

The account was first published in 1937, enjoyed a brief readership, and then—with the coming of world war to southwest Europe—faded from bedside tables and travel dreams. I came to it two years ago when Daunt Books in London reissued it, together with photographs, maps, and sketches that the author’s children discovered among his papers after his death.

My son-in-law gave me the book for Christmas in 2024, with the words: “Somehow I think this book was written with you in mind.” He knows my fondness for European bike travels, especially behind what was once the Iron Curtain.

+++

On this trip I was headed to Cyprus and a bike ride on both sides (Greek and Turkish) of the Green Line. I decided to carry Hamsher’s book along, even though I knew its hardback binding would weigh down my panniers when I set off from Larnaca, on the island’s southern coast. Despite the weightiness of his prose, Hamsher proved the ideal travel companion.

In the mid-1930s, when he set out on his bicycle from Vienna to Istanbul, Hamsher was a foreign correspondent in Austria, in part because he had grown up there, despite being British.

He conceived the trip one night at a bar with tipsy friends, and the book reprints the hand-drawn map in which he sketched out his route: south to Zagreb, along the Dalmatian coast to Split, Kotor, and Cetinje, and then somehow (by sea? across Macedonia?) to Salonica and finally Istanbul.

Once underway, Hamsher dropped the idea of a sea voyage from Patras to Athens and Salonica, and rode over the Macedonia hills to Lake Ohrid and from there to Salonica.

His ride was accomplished on a bone-crushing one-speed bike (he calls her Elfa) with flat-prone tires, and before ending up in Istanbul he detoured to Mount Athos, leaving us a detailed account of the holy mountain in league with that of the satiric British writer Robert Byron.

+++

What I loved most of all about Hamsher’s account, which I finished on my flight to Cyprus, was his perseverance on endless broken roads (he must have changed more than a hundred flats in the course of his 1,200 mile journey) and his good cheer in recounting rides in the rain or nights spent on cold barn floors. Nothing phases Hamsher, even when he has to push his bike (with a flat tire) up some Albanian goat track in a driving rain.

Here is his description of a rough stretch in what is now Croatia:

In Plashki (these village names were so impressed on my mind that I can still recite them off in correct order) a simultaneous sigh came from both Elfa’s tyres. I rode the street on flat rims in optimistic search of a village store which could renew my stock of rubber patches. Finding none, I set out to walk the twenty-five miles to the Plitvicka lakes, and was overtaken by a loaded haycart, drawn by two scraggy horses with backs like a miniature range of hills. After bargaining on his fingers, the driver consented to give me a lift, and hauled Elfa up to the top of the hay, where it enframed a baby who lay fast asleep in the full glare of the sun.

And when he makes it to Dubrovnik (a few years before Rebecca West got there in 1937), he writes:

Dubrovnik’s legendary beauty is in no wise exaggerated. But for me it heightened when, emerging from beneath the dark a way archway? of the town gate, I glimpsed a stalwart Chicagoan who was suddenly wafted from our company at Vienna, and whose pen now brought him unexpectedly into Dalmatia. Together we mounted a stumpy, bumpy tramcar, rode to the Lapad cove, reputed the only sandy spot along the whole coast, and swam in the sparkling Adriatic. Then the same howling, squealing tramcar took us back to the town, and he left for Bucharest, of all inaccessible cities, with the nonchalant remark that the rail connections might be awkward.

The Adriatic swim is one of the few pleasures on Hamsher’s ride. Otherwise, he’s engulfed in dust on potholed roads through endless mountains, sleeping rough without a bag or tent, and eating in a procession of roadside cafés.

+++

At the end of his road in Istanbul, Hamsher knew more about power politics than he realized, if only from pedaling from Vienna through what today is Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey.

Although it is not a book about politics, I read it as such, as most of the wars of the 20th and now the 21st centuries have been fought between the great powers over control of Balkan borders—nearly all of which Hamsher crossed on Elfa.

The irony of the Balkans today is that they are largely unwanted lands, except for Croatia’s summer resorts along the Dalmatian coast. Slovenia is Austrian enough to blend anonymously into the European Union, but further south, Bosnia is a failing state ready to implode along its ethnic lines.

Continuing south, Montenegro is the warm-water port of Russian oligarchs, while nearby Albania and Kosovo dream of either European or Ottoman integration, depending on which comes first. Greece lives off European summer dreams, but is falling well behind Turkey as the regional superpower.

With this paragraph, Hamsher captures the extent to which the Balkans were a cul-de-sac in 1937 (and ironically remain so today):

Wishing to glimpse Yugoslav Macedonia, instead of taking the straight road into Greece from Korcha, I chose a detour, which led first back to Pogradetz. Places like Novibazar, Prisren and Skoplje were offering themselves as an extremely attractive itinerary, and in spite of the usual terrorism warnings I thought I might attempt the first cycle crossing east from Skoplje, over the Jugoslav border into Bulgaria. From Sofia there would then be a wide variety of possible routes. All the roads I could discover in old Serbia, however, led from north to south. There is but one way into Bulgaria: the railroad through Nish.

Note: I know that train line from Nish. I have taken it in a $10 sleeper compartment from Belgrade (and even at that I was overpaying).

+++

Part of the reason I so warmed to Hamsher is that he makes it to Ohrid, which is on my short list whenever anyone asks my opinion of where they should vacation in Europe.

Of Ohrid, Hamsher writes:

In the morning he who’s he? showed me a view of the lake and the Albanian mountains from every accessible top-storey window; and we climbed to the roof of the tower, to look down on to Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania; the three countries which so nearly met at this south-eastern corner of Lake Ochrida. On departure, he fetched two loaves from the monastery kitchen and pressed them into my rucksack; presented me with a picture postcard of Sveti Naum; inflated Elfa’s tyres, and refused money.

Leaving Elfa in the rucksack’s company, in the afternoon I scrambled down the hillside for a glorious bathe, and in the evening came across a cycling road which quickly brought me into Ochrida, a delightful little white town which the Albanians see from their shore, and may well covet.

Nominally, the white town is in North Macedonia, but really, like Jerusalem or Hong Kong, it should belong to no one country.

In no particular order, Ohrid’s roots are Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Albanian, Serbian, and Bulgarian, and as you walk though the twisting hillside streets of its old town, you can find architectural relics from each of the above empires.

Best of all, Ohrid has some of the friendliest street cats in Europe (that is how I judge European cities), and in summer you can dine at lakeside bars and restaurants with your feet dangling in the water.

A train from London, with some changes, will get you close (well, to Bitola), but with various discount airlines you can now fly there directly. (This may spell Ohrid’s ruin.)

+++

Toward the end of his account, Hamsher takes his bicycle and rucksack and washes up on the shoresof Mount Athos, the autonomous monastic state on Greece’s Chalkidiki peninsula (southeast of Thessaloniki).

Alas, not much European thought is currently devoted to the twenty-something eastern orthodox monasteries that surround Mount Athos.

On the hilly peninsula overlooking the Aegean are Russian, Serb, Romanian, Greek, and Bulgarian churches, and monasteries of monks who grow, prepare, and serve all the food; woman have been banned on the peninsula since about 1054.

As Hamsher writes in his distinct, self-amused style:

Not that any of her kind could ever be allowed to land, for women — indeed, all feminine beings, as well as “children and smooth-faced persons” — have been taboo on the Holy Mountain ever since the famous Golden Bull of Constantine Monomachous was promulgated, a year or two before William the Conqueror stepped ashore at Hastings.

+++

Personally, as I am not much given to meditation or solitude (writers spend enough time to talking to themselves), I have never been drawn to Mount Athos. In Greece, I would a prefer to drink a cold Mythos while watching the sun set on the Acropolis or to read about Lord Elgin in the Agora (it was more his wife who liberated the Marbles).

At the same time, I loved Hamsher’s account of Athos’s sacred ways. Of its timelessness he writes:

The life of all on the Holy Mountain is governed by a plan of administration which has changed little in the course of centuries. The theocracy has survived invasion; it challenged and met all the temporal vicissitudes of Ottoman domination and Macedonian turmoil; it suffered its organization to be discussed by statesmen at international conferences. Yet Hagion Oros [aka Mount Athos] lives on, still untouched by most of what passes in the world outside its own quiet Ægean backwater.

Who knows: maybe it’s the place where Donald Trump could be sent to do penance for his many sins (mostly of commission, in the 30 percent range)—as the vow of silence would be just retribution for his empire of bombast.

This is the fifth in an occasional series about travels through the Balkans to and from the Green Line in Cyprus.