The Prespa lakes – Greater and Lesser – are amongst the oldest in Europe. Ancient lakes, enduring lakes, they are believed to be more than three million years old. At times, the larger resembles the sea, when veils of mist and cloud vanish the far shores. Or when sharp light stirs its surface - all … Continue reading Prespa : A Journey from Home pt. 2
“It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity. For as long as our records go back, we have … Continue reading Prespa: A Journey from Home
There are days that fall easily into two seasons, opening with a shimmer of spring heat before leaning back into winter-cold skies and bitter winds by their end, as if at the last moment a set of scales was tilted with the addition of a final, decisive weight. There’s little that is predictable about this … Continue reading A Time of Turning
For centuries men cloistered here, monastic, remote, alone. Men who’d shed some of the world as a way of contemplating its essence, stricter in their spiritual devotion to it. At the edge of this high mountain lake, they lived lives pared down to clear symmetry, in the way a piece of bone is carved slowly … Continue reading The Stone Coast
The two Prespa Lakes are split by a flat isthmus, a spur of sand which pelicans glide across in summer as they swap one body of water for the other. Those two lakes, though, were once one, a single blue bowl encircled by steep slopes. Over thousands of years, silt and sediment from the mountains … Continue reading Sand, Starlings and Other Small Things
Julian Hoffman 