To the (Other) Lake
Meet Nick Nasev, Kapka Kassabova's Lens on Prespa
Kapka Kassabova visits the Greek side of Prespa in To the Lake with a genial guide, her Virgil through spirals of dark memories. He is identified, with no last name, as Nick, an Australian-born translator, editor, and author. Through his perspective, shaped by stories from grandparents from all three divided parts of Macedonia, she sees a region scarred by war and displacement, a place of emptying villages, shrinking lakes, lost homes, and lost hope.1
Despite the hauntings of history, though, her Nick is anything but melancholic:
Nick had an instantly winning quality, a warm and unaffected exuberance. With an unerring magpie’s eye for the telling detail, an encyclopedic memory and boundless curiosity…his interests were omnivorous…he spoke five Slavic languages. Spanish, Some Greek, some Romanian , some Mandarin, and some Hebrew (his partner was Israeli).Recently rereading, I realized that I know Nick, that we’d exchanged friendly messages. He is Nick Nasev, who writes Nickipedia, a spirited Substack “talking about Balkan language and culture from a different perspective.” I was delighted when he agreed to a Zoom interview from his home in London. He shared his “different perspective” on travels with Kapka, on becoming a character in a book, and on how it felt for him and his mother to read the result. As you’ll see, he also reflected on how trauma manifests across generations. Thanks, Nick!
So how did those travels come about?
I met Kapka’s sister Asya in London through my friend, the writer Garth Cartwright,2 and then met Kapka through Asya. She invited me to visit Ohrid with her in May of 2017. It was a kind of trial run to see how it was to travel together. We had an amazing time—in Ohrid, at Sveti Naum and also in the Albanian part of Prespa covered in the book.
Later, she said she’d be coming back to visit the Greek side of Prespa, my area I suppose, since my maternal grandmother is from a village near Florina. Kapka asked me along to “investigate together.”
What did you add to her “investigation?”
Well, she had written one book about the area and already knew a lot, but I provided a personal angle on the history. For me, knowledge of the region is a lifelong legacy, one that started as soon as I was born.
So I connected her with the ethnic Macedonian side of things. That’s not visible, really, when you just visit. You need to dig deep, get past the veneer, the barrier of fear, to gain the trust of the local people. Only then can they speak freely, unfortunately: same as when I was a child, and I’m fifty years old!
She depicts Greek Prespa as dark and full of pain. You come across as almost Christ-like in taking on the psycho-historical trauma found there. She even relates it to your own health challenges. It’s dramatic storytelling, but I have to ask—did that come from you or is that her interpretation?
Well she took that pain on herself when we visited as well, even more so maybe! I’ve had all my life to process what happened there. I am at a greater peace about it all, though I am still processing.
I told her about how I’ve been placed with a burden because of all the memories that bombarded me as a child, especially from my grandparents and their different angles on what happened. And I broke down when I read all that, thinking “Wow, you’re right! So well perceived!”
By going with you, then, she was traveling not only through space, but also through time.
Oh, my God, it was traveling through time! I still see the area as it was in 1948. I grew up with the sense that the Greek Civil War had never finished. The names of the villages in Greek are not the names I know them by. I’m essentially seeing it all through my grandmother‘s eyes.
I wanted to ask how much came from her and how much from you because in general her writing is so layered, enriched by research, by allusion to myth and archetype, by her own experience. It sounds like she did take her cue from you, though, as to what the history of the region has meant for your life. And therein’s a clue about how she treats her encounters with people in her books more generally.
Yes. Basically she lets people talk and doesn’t say anything. And I just let it all out, I’d have to say. I gave her the life stories of my grandparents in particular, involving all three areas of Macedonia separated by politics. Even the name of the chapter, “Howl”, refers to the situation with my mother’s father and his long lost son in Bulgaria, who he never got to see except at the very end of his life when suffering from dementia.
And that was out of sheer bureaucratic orneriness on the part of the border authorities.
Right. So basically I just said it all and it was up to Kapka to relay what she wanted to relay.
And, my God, how she was able to see things! She correctly, very directly, relayed my frustrations with the area. I can’t stay there for long—because of the past and how people still can’t be who they are—it really eats me up inside.
So it's a hard place to visit.
Really, the Prespa region, especially the Greek side is basically dead, on life support.3 The life that was there is totally gone, and so somebody like me feels the pressure to learn about what had been. My mother didn’t even experience this pressure because my grandmother, her mother, was still processing it herself. By the time it got to me, though, there was a sense that I have to continue the line. Why did they escape otherwise? So there was pressure to continue what had been the life of this area. I took on that role, and it has served me well, but it comes with trauma.
How have you taken on that role?
As a writer and as a translator, even by knowing the particular form of the language itself, because I learned Macedonian from my parents and my grandparents. One Substack reader commented that I’m continuing the voice of my ancestors. When I’m speaking very colloquially, I like speaking in the Florina dialect, what we call Lerinski. Younger people in the region speak our language very differently, if at all, and in a very heavy Greek accent, but I still speak a fossilized version from the 1940s. That’s part of the legacy.
Given the suppression of the language in Greece for the past 70 years, the alphabet is a powerful legacy. Here’s how Kapka describes your coming upon a black marble gravestone in a cemetery near Kastoria, inscribed with deceased’s name twice—in Greek and in Cyrillic:
“ 'Oh my God,‘ Nick kept saying, in shock. 'I never thought I’d see this in Greece. I wish my grandmother could see it!’
“And tears welled up in his eyes. As they had in hers, when he’d written his first Cyrillic letters. They were the same tears, filtered by time as if by the karst. In the Cyrillic-Greek letters of this man’s name was the hidden story of Aegean Macedonia, with its vanishing dialects, people, place names and songs.How did it feel to read that?
You know, we just stared at that gravestone for ages. It was impossible, unthinkable, to see that in Greece, and even more unthinkable that it had not been destroyed by some sort of nationalist. Kapka saw the power of that, and she also remembered a story I had told her about when I started writing in Cyrillic and my grandmother was absolutely in tears of joy because I was doing something that even she couldn’t do. The fact that Kapka could correlate those, and see that I was basically my grandmother there—her writing is just magical!
How did your family respond to reading To the Lake?
My mother was in tears. She is the more direct recipient of the trauma, having had to deal with parents who as refugees had been shipped off to the other side of the world against their will. On top of that, in the 1950s Australia was unwelcoming for anyone who wasn’t of English-speaking background, who didn’t fit the British archetype.
All that was pretty tough. And the thing was, like so many other families, they didn’t talk about it. And so the trauma just boiled inside. In my wider family there are people who have been unwilling or just too flattened to deal with the demons of the past. And so they have taken it out in other ways.
But Kapka was talking about it, and that had my mother just absolutely crying —and also asking “Why would anyone want to know about this?”
And I thought, “well, you never know—this could actually be healing for other people too.”
The area north of the border is blighted as well. To get a look through compelling images, see Abandoned Prespa - Ljubojno / Napuštena Prespa / Ljubojno on the lovely photography site Balkanium. Photos and text by Kristian Evgo, who, in his words, has been “documenting the changes in my grandma's village in Prespa and the effects of globalization and climate change on the lake and the villages.”
If you missed it, A More Positive View was my post about Balkanium.
Balkan music enthusiasts may know Cartwright’s 2005 Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians, an account that spans Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and his encounters with the legends, among them Šaban Bajramović and Boban Marković, Esma Redžepova and Ferus Mustafov, Taraf de Haïdouks and Azis. If you’ve read it, please share your thoughts in the comments.
Concerning the region’s overlapping environmental and human distress, Nick has put a book by two respected British scholars on my short list: Lakes and Empires in Macedonian History: Contesting the Waters’, James Pettifer Miranda Vickers.
I haven’t read it yet, but below is a description from Google, where a free 50-page preview is available (follow the linked title above).
Drawing from oral testimonies and attentive to the construction of national histories, this book considers how the development of international borders, movement of people and role of national identities within imperial borderlands shaped Macedonia today. What is more, by centering the lakes and making use of an innovative environmental historical methodology, Pettifer and Vickers offer the first environmental history of this multi-ethnic borderland region shared by Greece, North Macedonia and Albania. The result is a nuanced and sophisticated transnational account of Macedonia from prehistory to the 21st century which will be essential reading for all Balkan scholars.
Thank you Jerry once again for this! It was great chatting with you.