The Sunken Church at Mavrovo
By Owen Clarke
It was two sweltering hours out of Tirana across sun-baked hills before we came to the mountain pass at Bastar-Murriz. In the winter, perhaps, there was snow here. At the end of August, there was only sand and dust. It blew across the heights and into nostrils, the corners of eyes and mouths.
The dust accompanied a caravan of battered Albanian BMWs and Audis, poorly equipped for the cratered dirt road. Hairy, paunchy men—or else yellowing, emaciated smoker types—hung from all windows bellowing at each other as they clunked their sedans up the hill. On the left side, the road dropped away into a grassy slope so steep it may as well have been a cliff face. On the right, a jagged rock ramp rose up and away into the hills.
I piloted a top-heavy Harley, a 530-pound (dry) Pan America that came out of Rome, the hard cases laden with camping gear and clothes and water jugs and other travelers' detritus.
On the back rode my girlfriend and dauntless riding partner, Tessa.
This wasn’t our first trip together, so she was there and she wasn’t there, in that unique way of motorcycle rider and passenger linked together on motorcycle journeys. She was at my back, holding on, one with me in the physical sense, but over the roar of the wind and the 1250cc engine, there was no way to communicate save for the odd thumbs up or thumbs down. Some people use headsets to talk, we just use ours to play music. During these rides, we may be close physically, but our minds drift through separate oceans of thought.
With all this weight plus the two of us, the motorcycle had to be well over 750 pounds, and in the stop-and-go traffic on the precipitous dust road, jammed behind honking cars, there was little to do but ascend in wide, sweeping curves and pray she didn’t tip over. The road was so steep and dusty that the brakes couldn’t hold the bike on the incline, every time I tried to lock in, we slid backward.
After one hair-raising sequence where we nearly slid back off the road entirely, I lost patience and rumbled around the bumbling line of sedans and up over the pass. On the far side, Tessa and I stopped in a grassy alpine meadow and sucked water.
Then we came down into the valley, turned west to a place called Maqellarë, and finally crossed the Macedonian border into a town on the water called Debar. From here, it was a straight shot north through a verdant gorge, walls of coniferous forest looming hundreds of feet above all sides, so dense and green they evoked not Balkans but Congo.
Perched on the cliff sides above, Orthodox monasteries looked down on us like sentinels. Their presence was comforting, in a sense, because Eastern Orthodoxy has always been a part of my life.
I am a quarter Lebanese. My grandmother’s family comes from Lebanon, and her six children and ten brothers have instilled their religious traditions in us far more than the rest of my family’s Scotch-Irish blend. My name, Owen, comes from an Anglicization of my family’s original Lebanese name, Aoun. They changed it upon immigration.
I was baptized and raised in the Antiochian Orthodox Church. These days, my religious views are far looser, but it’s never far from me. My mother and many of my relatives attend the church, as do I, on occasion.
Less than 0.5% of Americans ascribe to Eastern Orthodoxy, the original Christian tradition before the Roman Catholics and their Pope split during the Schism of 1054 and the Protestants later, in 1517. But here in the East, Orthodoxy is the Christian norm. The majority of religious Macedonians are Orthodox Christians.
Tessa and I took the bike up to some of these monasteries in the hills. Tessa—crying feminism when a monk asked her to don a skirt to cover her open pant legs—waited outside while I knelt and performed the sign of the cross and took scoops of the Holy Water.
I did this not necessarily because I believed it mattered but because it seemed a shame not to. I was here, wasn’t I?
We moved north through the gorges, tracking a river called the Radika, and entered North Macedonia’s largest national park, Mavrovo, in the shadow of the lumbering Sâr and further north, Korab, the highest peak in both Albania and North Macedonia.
We came out from this gorge above the dam on Lake Mavrovo, a shimmering expanse of alpine crystal water, dammed in the 1950s. Along the shores was a village and—in the winter—a ski town, though these years the snow was less and less. Like many resorts in the Julian Alps and elsewhere in the low Balkan ranges, the slopes here were doomed.
Now the town was dark and shuttered. We pulled into the parking lot of a lodge by the water, and it began to rain. Tessa went inside to take a nap, and I walked out along the water, stretching my numb legs, which had been the better part of six hours in the saddle from the coast at Karpen, where we’d camped the night before.
In Mavrovo, there is a church by the water. It is called St. Nicholas Church, built in 1850. It is also called the sunken church. This is because when the river was dammed, the resulting lake rose up around it, and from then on, it was only accessible by boat. It was not on an island. In fact, the water just reached a few inches below the front step and went no further. The building seemed to float just a hair’s breadth above water.
When I came to the shores and looked out at the church, however, it was not sunken. It was summer, and the land was in drought. The church was accessible by a walk across the earth. From here, I could already see that the building had mostly fallen in on itself.
I scanned the shoreline. I was alone. There was a harsh, cold wind whipping across the shores of the drying lake, and the rain slanted against my face with what felt like a personal grievance.
Pushing against this rain, I walked to the church. The wooden doors threatened to fall off their rusted hinges when I pressed them open. They moved with reluctance and squeals. Ahead was a raised stone altar, with no discernible iconography. Wrapped with weeds and tickled with dim light peeking through the gray clouds above, the altar appeared more pagan than Christian.
This was not a particularly old place, as places in this part of the world go. It was built in 1850. Just a few days later, outside Skopje, we visited a church over 800 years old. A year later, in Montenegro, I stepped into one that was well over 1,000 years old.
But out here in the raised earth where once was water, the church felt like something ancient. Emerged. Atlantean. The air inside felt colder than outside. Not devoid of warmth, but wholly set apart from the land around it.
Whenever I enter places like this, I always expect to hear something, to experience something tangible. Words from a god, a touch on the shoulder from an angel, or some equivalent supernatural being. I never have.
I spent the better part of an hour in that sunken church. I told myself I was praying, or perhaps meditating. I tried to speak to something outside of myself, because I felt like something outside of myself was present here, and that’s a feeling I don’t often have.
It may not have been speaking to me, but it felt “present.”
Was it on the stone altar? In the dark sky sending rain through the crumbled roof? In the busted wooden chair rotting in the weeds? In the candles and the basin sheltered under the still-roofed vestibule?
Perhaps only in my mind? Did that make it any less real?
I spoke to it and it did not respond, and I felt at peace because of that. I’m not sure what I would do if something spoke back.
During my life, I’ve always tried to keep my eyes open so that I don’t miss the bigger picture. I’ve never seen it all, or even most of it, and I’m not sure this is possible. But there are moments when I’ve seen fragments. Outlines.
This was one of those times. Here I felt connected to something truly beautiful. Everything and nothing. An empty church in a nearly empty lake. It was what I was looking for. A void rending all into nil.
It was the only salvation I could ever understand, much less long for, which is probably why I never managed to stick with any religion.
Still, this philosophical Möbius strip was at once sensical and nonsensical, and I pulled off from tracking its curves, lest it dissolve like a snowflake examined too long in the warm palm of a hand.
I had sensed it. Brushed its edges. That was enough. A glimpse. The picture can’t fully reveal itself in this life, except maybe when our minds have melted away into death. Even then, perhaps not.
A few hours later, at a bar on what was once the shore of the lake, I sat and drank a beer on the veranda and watched the rain, heavier now, angling down onto the wet ground.
A wrinkled man of obscure age nursed a coffee on a stool next to me, his checkered wool coat sparkled with moisture from the walk over in the rain. He had wide, flat ears and thick sprouts of hair sticking out of his knobby nose.
“It’s a shame about the church,” I said.
“Ah?”
“The water isn’t near it anymore. It’s all dried up.”
He looked at me quizzically, as if unable to fathom why I would care. He shrugged. “I do not go to church. The church.”
“Me neither,” I said. “But the photos when the church had the water around it. They were pretty. It was unique, you know?”
The man coughed and tugged on one of his flaplike ears. He gestured out at the shrunken lake, the rain coming down from above. It was heavier now. “The water will come again. It’s raining now. In the winter… you can see. There will be more water.”
“It’s like this every year?” I asked. “Dry in the summer?”
“No,” he said. “Maybe yes. Maybe no. There is less water now. These years.” He did not say it like it was a bad thing, just a thing. He considered something, then appeared slightly perplexed, whether at his own remark or my response or whatever he was thinking about, I could not tell.
He coughed again and sipped his coffee. “There’s something more. Always something more.”
The rain beat a staccato on the corrugated aluminum above us. The man picked his teeth with the broken end of a toothpick, then flicked it off the veranda into the mud.
I walked back to the lodge in the rain and checked on the bike. There was a ratty orange tabby cat sitting below it, somewhat sheltered from the rain by the space under the rear tire. The mud-caked motorcycle was keeping it semi-dry.
When the rain was gone, I imagined it would come out again. That or be squished into a pulp by the rear tire when we pulled out of the lodge in three days' time.
For now, it did not appear to want to do much except be here.
Owen Clarke is a freelance journalist, motorcyclist, and mountaineer, and the founder of this publication. You can find his work on his website.
