Kalishta, Easter, and a Cave Monastery
We love to walk. Walking along Lake Ohrid to Struga from where we are staying a few minutes east of Struga is so pleasant. And we knew the path continued on and thought it would be nice to walk and explore further. Which we did. Multiple times, because it was such an amazing walk!
Past the main river and beachfront area, you get into more and more gorgeous cafes. Many of them are beachfront and most with playgrounds for kids, as is typical of so many of the cafes in Struga. The path keeps going and gets out into a more rural setting, following along the beach with no buildings in sight for most of the time. You pass a couple of smaller little areas where people camp and there’s a restaurant/common building for those people dotted in amongst the various scenic and remote sections of the pathway. And the pathway itself is so nice and so well maintained.
Eventually, you hit the next small town, Kalishta, which had a couple of waterfront restaurants that were so cute and had a gorgeous view out across the lake. It was a nice perspective to see Struga from across the water! The first walk we stopped in this town and had a snack at Restoran Galija on the water. It was so nice and peaceful.
The second time, I did the walk on my own. I rarely get the opportunity to have time to myself, so when Jon offered to let me have a few hours to myself I decided to take a nice, long walk out to this town after we had breakfast. I stopped for a coffee at the second restaurant in town before heading back to Struga. In total, it was about 1.5 hours to walk to Kalishta each way from our apartment. The entire walk is along Lake Ohrid on a beautiful pathway system. It was such a peaceful and serene morning to walk out there and I had hoped to get to do it alone a second time, but we were just so busy with so much to see, do, and explore that it never quite worked out.
The third trip out there was on Easter Sunday, which was on May 5 this year. North Macedonia is an Orthodox Christian country, which meant that we got to experience Easter twice this year away: once on our Catholic Easter weekend, and once on the Orthodox one. Our anniversary had been May 4, and we stayed out at the wine bar until after 11 p.m. with the girls. We then walked over to the church with the hard-boiled eggs the Happy Street gentlemen provided us, bought some candles, and joined the candlelight midnight procession festivities.
It was such an experience! The girls loved staying up late. And they loved it when everyone started doing the egg wars with their hard-boiled eggs. The winner is supposed to have good luck for the next year. Katia was our big winner and is looking forward to good luck! Several other people gave us hard-boiled eggs over the next two days including Valentina, Dijana at the library, and the monastery we went to the next day. So Emmeline, Jon, and I had plenty of opportunities to win some competitions, and hopefully some luck!, ourselves.
Easter morning we slept in a little after our late night at the church. We then walked to Kalishta, hoping to get some lunch. Unfortunately, everything was closed that day. We had worried about that, but most restaurants were still open in Struga as we passed by so we figured it would be ok. Given that there’s a huge Muslim population mixed in with a huge Orthodox Christian population, it seemed that most places were open most days from what a lot of people told us. Muslims would always get their holy days off work, while Christians would always get their holy days off work. Thankfully, we never go anywhere without snacks and water!
We carried on to the Monastery of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is on the other side of Kalishta about a five-minute walk away. We were able to walk into the monastery and look around with a ton of other families who were there to celebrate Easter Sunday and pay their religious respects. It was a beautiful complex, right on the water. We were also able to go into the section of the monastery that was built into the cave. It was fascinating to see! It was quite the tight staircase to go up, and you really needed to climb and yet compress yourself into a ball to get into a lot of the rooms. The doors were shorter than our kids, so even they needed to duck! The rooms were fascinating to see and to know that people were living and worshipping in these rooms for hundreds of years. Wow! It was a unique way to spend Orthodox Easter Sunday.
On our walk back to Struga, we were able to stop at one of the campground spots and eat at their restaurant. For once, our children were low on energy from the late night, lack of food, and the hot weather and declined to jump on the trampoline the restaurant had. Consider me shocked! I didn’t know my kids could run out of energy, even temporarily. Granted, it all came back in spades as soon as we finished eating and cooling off in the shade during our lunch!
We wish we had the opportunity to do that walk a couple more times but are grateful for the times we did get to do it. It was so peaceful. And a great way to get in well over 20,000 steps! It was also nice to get to experience their traditional Easter celebrations and learn more about their cultural traditions from the various lovely people we had met and gotten to know in Struga. We love learning about different cultures and customs along our travels!