Balkan Day 4 - A Day in Ohrid

Our first day in Ohrid started with breakfast at the hotel, which unfortunately did not surprise us very positively. At 10:00 am, we took the bus to the beautiful old town of Ohrid. There, our tour guide Michael was waiting for us, who led us through the old town that morning. He spoke fluent German and knew incredibly much about the history of the city and the whole country. We will now tell you a lot about it, as it was very interesting to learn so much about Macedonia and only a few people know anything about the history of the Balkans, let alone Macedonia. Michael told us that Ohrid is the oldest city in which there has been continuous life and also the center of the Cyrillic script. Because the Cyrillic script was banned a long time ago by the church. The students at the university, who had learned the language there, were distributed all over the world to eradicate the script - two of them came to Ohrid. There, they decided to revive the Cyrillic script. So it was spread from Ohrid throughout the Balkans.

Together with Michael, we walked through the old town, passing by shops, a paper-making shop, and numerous excavation sites. You can find excavations everywhere in Ohrid and the Theology University is currently being rebuilt. Numerous basilicas and houses have been uncovered here. On the way to the 1000 year old church 'Saint Sofia', we kept encountering the blue-white taxis that represent the colors of Ohrid. There are many churches in Ohrid, most of them from the 13th or 14th century (Some people say that there used to be 365 churches, so that you could visit a different one every day of the year), but none is as old as the one we looked at. The 'Saint Sofia' is an Orthodox church and has a wonderful acoustics. The dome it once had was unfortunately destroyed by an earthquake, so a part of the church was added in the 14th century.

Next, we went to a Roman theater that was excavated only at the beginning of the 2000s. It was only discovered by chance because stones were being taken away for house construction. Concerts are now held there as part of a Summer Festival every year in July. However, since the admission for this spectacle is very expensive and the income of the people in Ohrid is extremely low, averaging around 200 - 250 € per month, hardly anyone living there can afford to attend. Therefore, people often visit other big cities like Skopje. Many hope for a better life there, for example, by working for German companies, as the salary is higher there and there is better insurance.

We continued to Ohrid Fortress, which is located above the city on a hillside. In earlier times, it was the strategic base of Ohrid. The location of the city by the lake and the mountainous landscape prevented the capture of Ohrid during times of war.

On the way back to the city center, we met a bridal couple, to whom we immediately sang a little serenade as congratulations. After spending some free time in Ohrid, which the Mristen used for an extensive lunch, we returned to the hotel by bus, where we got ready for the concert in the evening. Originally, three more choirs were supposed to perform at this concert, but they had canceled at short notice, stating that they prefer to sing outdoor. So we were the only choir to sing in the church that evening, and since the announcements and advertising for this concert had been extremely poorly managed by the festival organizers, we only had five spectators. Three of them were involved in organizing the festival. We were very surprised, but of course, we still sang and considered it as a casual rehearsal with an audience. Despite the strange circumstances, we had a lot of fun singing for our audience, which was partly due to the great acoustics of the church! After about 20-30 minutes, we ended our 'concert'.

There was indeed an open-air event of the Summer Festival taking place on the central square in Ohrid. Right after our concert, the organizers accompanied us to this square and told us that we would soon be up to perform. However, after waiting for half an hour and no indication from the organizers that we were going to perform, we decided to leave the event at around 10:00 pm so we could finally have some dinner. This was very disappointing to the organizers, as they had actually planned for us to be the grand finale, but we had not been informed of this.

Since the dinner the previous evening at our hotel was a bit of a disaster and hardly anyone had eaten enough, we were all looking forward to the meal at a restaurant near our hotel. Ms. Lohse and Ms. Demirhan had organized this at short notice - thank you once again!!!

There, we ended the evening with good food, a cool restaurant staff, and the birthday celebration of two of our fellow singers. After this eventful day, we really deserved it!

After reciprocal serenades from the restaurant staff and us, we said goodbye and then spent the rest of the evening individually at the hotel.