For those lucky visitors to Ohrid who get the opportunity to spend time with one of Macedonia’s pre-eminent archaeologists, Pasko Kuzman, a world of ancient relics and remarkable stories awaits.
Ensconced in his element, the wonderful repository of antiquities he carefully oversees at the city’s museum, the archaeologist is glad to spread his infectious enthusiasm for the great potential of Macedonian archaeology- according to him, a resource still largely untapped.
Some of Mr. Kuzman’s notable achievements include the discovery of the priceless Ancient Macedonian golden mask of Ohrid, similar to four previously found at the necropolis of Trebenista, the faithful reconstruction of the Byzantine church of Plaosnik, and the ongoing excavation of a 3,000 year-old settlement now submerged deep under water near the village of Gradiste, tucked halfway down Ohrid’s southeastern shore.
In July, more excavations in the central fortress of the medieval Tsar Samuel unearthed remains of what is believed to be the first fortress of King Philip II of Macedon, dating back to the fourth century B.C.
Kuzman also began the excavation works in Vevchani, where the ruins of a mysterious church were discovered last fall. With the warm spring weather now returning to Macedonia, excavations will resume and hopefully the church will divulge its secrets soon enough (though he recently told us that they have not yet resumed).
The museum in Ohrid is housed in a grand and stately old building. The cozy laboratory where Kuzman and his assistants work is located several floors up a narrow stairway. On a long worktable illuminated by white lights, penciled index cards and drawings of artifacts overlay ancient finds in the process of documentation. Neatly assembled along the shelf behind are rows of ancient Macedonian battle helmets, swords, jewelry and pots.
As Kuzman merrily works away on cataloguing the enormous backlog of little treasures on the table, he points out the presence of the Star of Vergina, the symbol of the ancient House of Macedon, found on rounded drinking vessels among other objects. He points to this fact with satisfaction: “it indicates that this was an Ancient Macedonian, and not some other civilization that lived in Ohrid’s ancestor,Lychnidos.” The decoration is shaded in red and yellow pencil on a worn old booklet suited for the purpose.
The shelves are lined with spears and arrowheads, daggers and necklaces and curving vessels. There are rusted, narrow-fitting helmets, and round-topped ones with almost a sort of metal visor brimming out. But the most beautiful among them is a shone bronze helmet, adorned with wreath and ram’s head with curving horn over the ear piece. Relics like these conjure up both the glorious civilizations that created them and the bloody battles in which they were used.
Another item pointing to the Ancient Macedonian legacy in Ohrid, tucked safely away in its own special container, is the more famous golden mask of Trebenista. One of the biggest discoveries to have taken place in the modern-day Republic of Macedonia, it caused a sensation when dug up on September 30, 2002.
The mask also means a lot to the Macedonians because the four other similar ones previously found were spirited away by foreign occupiers, probably never to return; two by the Bulgarians upon being discovered in 1918, and the other two by the Serbs in 1934. Now in museums in Sofia and Belgrade, the masks were thought to be the only ones for a long time. Yet further excavations a the Gorna Porta of Ohrid’s old town yielded a fifth mask and accompanying golden glove with gold ring on it. They were found in a tomb together with several rings and sandals woven with silver.
According to Kuzman, this discovery among others indicates that Lychnidos was at some stage a city for the Ancient Macedonian aristocracy, rather than an Illyrian town as he had learned in university. He maintains that the funereal masks can teach modern researchers much about the prevailing social relationships of Antiquity and, romantically, that the delicate gold mask meant to cover the face of the dead person helped that person to communicate in some way with the living from the afterlife.
