I Traveled Through Time With My Family in the Heart of Macedonia

The rain had soaked through my jacket and into my boots by the time my friend Rachel and I reached Sveti Jovan Kaneo, a 13th-century church in the North Macedonian town of Ohrid. Our husbands and children had stayed behind at the hotel, but we hustled a half mile through a late-spring storm toward the octagonal dome that sat atop a weathered brick building. After opening the gate, we came to a large wooden door, only to find it locked tight. 

As we turned to leave, defeated, Rachel noticed a priest arriving at the gate. He unlocked the door, we stepped in, and I immediately gasped. I’ve seen a lot of churches, but this one was well worth the journey. 

Light filtered through skylights and cross-shaped cutouts on the walls, illuminating frescoes in the domed ceiling and gilded icons around the room. The priest pointed out Biblical stories depicted in the intricate art. Christianity is not my religion, but as the rays glinted off the gold, making the figures come alive, I understood how places like this created believers. When we asked if we could take pictures, the priest pointed to a sign forbidding photography. Then he shrugged, perhaps thinking better of it. “Memories are important,” he said.

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His response felt sage in Ohrid, a town that carries so much history. It sits on the shore of Lake Ohrid, which straddles the border of North Macedonia and Albania. In 2023, scientists discovered an 8,000-year-old stilt village, believed to be the oldest of its kind in Europe, submerged near the water’s edge. The lake is almost 2 million years old and a UNESCO World Heritage site, in part because of its unique biodiversity. 

While excavations of the underwater village are ongoing, present-day Ohrid feels like a window into an earlier time. During our trip, our children climbed the support posts of the 1,000-year-old tree that stands in the town square to pose for a photo. We stopped at the National Workshop for Handmade Paper to hear about the craft as practiced by local monks in the 16th century, and bought the kids gelato from a shop in the Ottoman-era bazaar, a pedestrian street leading up from the port that comes alive in the early evening. 

Ohrid is said to have once had 365 churches, one for each day of the year. Our hotel, the Jovanovic Guest House (doubles from $52), was across the street from the 11th-century Sveta Sofija. (Sveti, or sveta for the feminine, means sacred or saint in several Slavic languages.) When the Ottoman Empire took control of the region in the 15th century, the building was converted into a mosque and the church’s paintwings were covered up. In the mornings, we stared out at it from our balcony, as we ate a traditional breakfast of cheese pie and homemade yogurt.

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After a few days of exploring, we wanted to get out onto Lake Ohrid. Guidebooks, and an Internet full of people who had clearly visited in high season, described a pier full of boats. But on a damp Sunday afternoon during the spring shoulder season, no such fleet appeared. So instead, I reached out to a tour company I found online. 

“You only have tomorrow available?” Nikola Martinoski of B&F Cruise Ohrid responded, almost immediately. “Tuesday will be sunny.” But we were leaving on Tuesday, so after checking that conditions would be safe enough, Martinoski instructed us to meet him the next morning on the beach. 

After breakfast, we boarded the covered pontoon boat and headed south, passing Vila Biljana, one of the many country retreats of then-president Josip Broz Tito when this area was still part of Yugoslavia. These days, North Macedonian officials summer there instead. 

We also zipped by the thatched-roof huts at the Bay of Bones. These replicate a 3,000-year-old village—a younger sibling of the subaquatic settlement currently being excavated. They are part of the Museum on Water, which re-creates life in the Neolithic period through artifacts recovered from beneath the lake’s surface.

At the monastery Sveti Naum, about 20 miles south of the city, the children lit candles, then cooed at the ducks and turtles roaming the shore as we walked back to the boat. For lunch, we headed north to Restaurant & Terrace Uno (entrées $6–$15), where we ordered four different kinds of fish—whatever they had caught that morning, we ate. Before our trout was grilled, the waiter brought it to our table, demonstrating its freshness by pointing out its silver skin. We had the fish with plates of tomato-and-feta salad, thick slices of bread, pickled peppers, and tavče gravče, the ubiquitous national dish of beans in a clay pot.

As predicted, the sun came out on Tuesday. While my husband went mountain biking with a guide through the foothills of Galičica, the mountain that divides Lake Ohrid and its neighbor, Lake Prespa, I drove my daughters to the village of Elshani. I arranged with Risto’s Guest House (set menu $10) for a donkey ride before settling in for a homemade meal of leek bread and chicken, accompanied by tavče gravče (always), cherry juice, and walnut cookies. 

From high in the hills, the lake looked a gleaming blue; on the way back to town, we stopped at a beach for a closer look at the clear water. While I took photos, my kids pretended to catch fish with sticks—the kind of game, it struck me, that children could have played on that very spot 8,000 years ago. After a few moments, I prodded the kids to get in the car, because we had a long drive into neighboring Albania that afternoon. But when they complained, I let them keep playing, reminding myself of what the priest had said: memories are, indeed, important. 

A version of this story first appeared in the April 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Treasures of the Deep.”