Ohrid
Ohrid is a city in North Macedonia and is the seat of the Ohrid Municipality. It is the largest city on Lake Ohrid and the eighth-largest city in the country, with it recording a population of over 38,000 inhabitants as of 2021. Ohrid is known for once having 365 churches, one for each day of the year, and has been referred to as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans". The city is rich in picturesque houses and monuments, and tourism is predominant. It is located southwest of Skopje, west of Resen and Bitola. In 1979 and in 1980, respectively, Ohrid and Lake Ohrid were accepted as Cultural and Natural World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. Ohrid is one of only 40 sites that are part of UNESCO's World Heritage that are Cultural as well as Natural sites.
Name
In antiquity the city was known under the ancient Greek name of Λυχνίς, Λυχνιδός or Λύχνιδος and the Latin Lychnidus, probably meaning "city of light", literally "a precious stone that emits light", from λύχνος, "lamp, portable light". Polybius, writing in the second century BC, refers to the town as Λυχνίδιον - Lichnidion.The evolution of the ancient toponym Lychnidus into Ohr required a long-standing period of Tosk Albanian–Eastern South Slavic bilingualism, or at least contact, resulting from the Tosk Albanian rhotacism -n- into -r- and Eastern South Slavic l-vocalization ly- into o-.
It became capital of the First Bulgarian Empire in the early medieval period, and was often referred to by Byzantine writers as Achrida. By 879 AD, the town was no longer called Lychnidos but was referred to as Ohrid.
In Macedonian and the other South Slavic languages, the name of the city is Ohrid. In Albanian, the city is known as Ohër or Ohri and in modern Greek Ochrida and Achrida. The name of the city in Aromanian is Ohãrda.
History
Antiquity
The earliest inhabitants of the wider Lake Ohrid region were the Illyrian tribes of Enchele and Dassaretii. According to a tradition the town was founded by Cadmus, the Phoenician king of Thebes, who fled to Enchele after being banished from Boeotia. In addition to Ohrid, called Lychnidos in classical antiquity, he is said to have founded Budva in Montenegro. Lychnidos was the capital city of the Illyrian Dassaretii.According to recent excavations, this was a town as early as of the era of king Philip II of Macedon. They conclude that Samuil's Fortress was built on the site of an earlier fortification, dated to the 4th century BC. In 210 BCE, Philip V of Macedon raided a number of southern Illyrian communities. He maintained a garrison at Lychnidos but lost control of the settlement in 208 BCE, when its commander joined local leader Aeropus and invited the Dardani in the region.
During the Roman conquests, towards the end of 3rd and the beginning of 2nd century BC, Lychnidus is mentioned as a town near or within Dassaretia. In Roman times, it was located along the Via Egnatia, which connected the Adriatic port Dyrrachion with Byzantium. Archaeological excavations prove an early adoption of Christianity in the area. Bishops from Lychnidos participated in multiple ecumenical councils.
Middle Ages
The South Slavs began to arrive in the area during the 6th century AD. By the early 7th century, it was colonized by a Slavic tribe known as the Berziti. Bulgaria conquered the city around 840.The name Ohrid first appeared in 879. The Ohrid Literary School, established in 886 by Clement of Ohrid, became one of the two major cultural centres of the First Bulgarian Empire. Between 990 and 1015, Ohrid was the empire's capital and stronghold.
From 990 to 1018, Ohrid was also the seat of the Bulgarian Patriarchate. After the Byzantine reconquest of the city in 1018 by Basil II, the Bulgarian Patriarchate was downgraded to an Archbishopric of Ohrid, and placed under the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
The higher clergy after 1018 was almost invariably Greek, including during the period of Ottoman domination, until the abolition of the archbishopric in 1767. At the beginning of the 16th century, the archbishopric reached its peak, subordinating the Sofia, Vidin, Vlach and Moldavian eparchies, part of the former medieval Serbian Patriarchate of Peć,, and even the Orthodox districts of Italy, Venice and Dalmatia.
As an episcopal city, Ohrid was a cultural center of great importance for the Balkans. Almost all surviving churches were built by the Byzantines and by the Bulgarians, with the rest dating back to the short time of Serbian rule during the late Middle Ages.
Bohemond, leading a Norman army from southern Italy, took the city in 1083. The Byzantines regained it in 1085. Albanian ruler Golem of Kruja likely had had control over Ohrid but it was later ceded to the Byzantine Empire by negotiation. In the 13th and 14th century, the city changed hands between the Despotate of Epirus, the Bulgarian, Byzantine and Serbian Empires, and Albanian rulers. In the mid-13th century, Ohrid was one of the cities ruled by Pal Gropa, a member of the Albanian noble Gropa family. In a text by Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, there is mention of nomadic Albanians present in the vicinity of Ohrid at around 1328. The presence of the Turkish community dates from their settlement in Ohrid during 1451–81.
In 1334, the city was captured by Stefan Uroš IV Dušan and incorporated in the Serbian Empire. After Dusan's death, the city came under the control of Andrea Gropa. After his death, Prince Marko incorporated it in the Kingdom of Prilep.
In the early 1370s, Marko lost Ohrid to Pal II Gropa, another member of the Gropa family, and unsuccessfully tried to recapture it in 1375 with Ottoman assistance.
In 1395, the Ottomans under Bayezid I captured the city, which became the seat of the newly established Sanjak of Ohrid. Some time after Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg had liberated Krujë to begin his rebellion, his troops—in coordination with Gjergj Arianiti and Zaharia Gropa —liberated Ohrid and the castle of Svetigrad.
From 14–15 September 1464, 12,000 Albanian troops of the League of Lezhë and 1,000 of the Republic of Venice defeated a 14,000-man Ottoman force near the city in the Battle of Ohrid. When Mehmed II returned from Albania after his actions against Skanderbeg in 1466, he dethroned Dorotheos, the Archbishop of Ohrid, and expatriated him—together with his clerks and boyars and considerable number of citizens of Ohrid—to Istanbul, probably because of their anti-Ottoman activities during Skanderbeg's rebellion amid which many citizens of Ohrid, including Dorotheos and his clergy, supported Skanderbeg and his fight.
Ottoman period
During the 16th century, Ohrid was located in the Sanjak of Ohrid. In the years 1529–1536, Sanjak of Ohrid had 33,271 households, with 1331 widows and 3392 unmarried singles. There were 859 settlements and 10 cities, with an average of 28.7 houses per settlement. Ohrid itself had 337 Christian families, 44 unmarried singles, 12 widows and 93 Muslim families. In 1583, the Sanjak of Ohrid was made up of several Kazas, including the Kaza of Ohrid, which were in turn made of Nahiyes; the Ottoman Defter recorded, within the Nahiya of Ohrid, 2,920 Christian homes, 627 unmarried singles and 465 Muslim families within a total of 107 settlements.In 1889, according to a French research, the city had 2.500-3.000 houses and approximately 12.000 individuals, of which 2/3 were Bulgarians and Vlachs and the rest 1/3 were Albanophone Muslims with 20-25 Slavophone Greek families. The Christian population declined during the first centuries of Ottoman rule. In 1664, there were only 142 Christian households. The situation changed in the 18th century when Ohrid emerged as an important trade center on a major trade route. At the end of this century it had around five thousand inhabitants.
Towards the end of the 18th century and in the early part of the 19th century, Ohrid region, like other parts of European Turkey, was a hotbed of unrest. In the 19th century the region of Ohrid became part of the Pashalik of Scutari, ruled by the Bushati family.
After the Christian population of the bishopric of Ohrid voted on a plebiscite in 1874 overwhelmingly in favour of joining the Bulgarian Exarchate, the Exarchate became in control of the area. In 1889, Gustav Weigand discovered in Ohrid the important Codex Dimonie, a collection of Aromanian-language religious texts. In statistics gathered by Vasil Kanchov in 1900, the city of Ohrid was inhabited by 8000 Bulgarians, 5000 Turks, 500 Muslim Albanians, 300 Christian Albanians, 460 Vlachs and 600 Romani. The Bulgarian researcher Vasil Kanchov wrote in 1900 that many Albanians declared themselves as Turks. Ohrid, the population that declared itself Turkish "was of Albanian blood", but it "had been Turkified after the Ottoman invasion, including Skanderbeg", referring to Islamization.
The majority of the Christian inhabitants of the city were under the supremacy of the Bulgarian Exarchate. According to " La Macédoine et sa Population Chrétienne ", statistics of the secretary of the exarchate Dimitar Mishev on the Christian population in Macedonia, in 1905 the Christian population of Ohrid consisted of 7,768 Exarchist Bulgarians, 168 Greek Patriarchal Bulgarians, 56 Serboman Patriarchal Bulgarians, 660 Vlachs and 6 Albanians. In the city there is 1 secondary and 5 primary Bulgarian schools and 1 primary Greek, Serbian and Wallachian school each.
Modern Albanian study claims that in 1903 the Cartographic Society of Sofia registered incorrectly 8,893 households of Albanian or Vlach ethnicity in the Kaza of Ohrid. There were supposedly 2,610 households registered in Ohrid, but after further analysis of the documents by Dervishi et al., it was discovered that the city actually had 3,700 households; there were 2,100 Albanian Muslim households, 150 Albanian Christian households, 900 Bulgarian households, 300 Vlach households, 210 Serb households and 39 Greek households. The Cartographic Society of Sofia also incorrectly registered many villages - that were in fact inhabited entirely or mostly by Albanians - as Bulgarian. 14 villages were registered as Albanian with 991 households, but further investigation by Dervishi et al. revealed that the number was actually 2,400. Therefore, with those corrections, the Kaza of Ohrid had 5,336 Albanian households, 4,347 Slavic households, 1,549 mixed household and 125 Vlach households that were mainly spread across two villages. By the end of Ottoman rule, the Kaza of Ohrid itself numbered to 38,000 Albanian inhabitants and 36,500 non-Albanian inhabitants as indicated by statistics gathered from the Ottoman authorities.