Lake Ohrid and the Péchot story

We are sorry not to meet our friends at the 16mm Peterborough AGM and Show. For the greater good, we are all staying at home. It is a chance to read, dream and plan expeditions we can undertake once travel restrictions are lifted. We start with a picture of the fascinating Péchot-Bourdon locomotive as it has several links with Lake Ohrid, links we discovered when researching our Péchot models and 'Colonel Péchot: Tracks To The Trenches'

Print of a Péchot-Bourdon locomotive, designed to run on portable track. Print courtesy Raymond Duton

It is an area we long to visit. Ohrid and its sister lake Prespa  are found in the Balkans peninsula, the vast peninsula which separates the Adriatic from the Black Sea. The Balkans are on the crossroads between Europe and Asia, so are generally interesting, but we’d like to focus on the Ohrid area.

Ohrid appeals to my Scottish soul because it has affinities with our own Loch Ness. The names of both lakes share the Scottish ‘huh’. Both lakes act as boundaries. Loch Ness lies along an ancient fault-line separating the eastern and western Scottish highlands while Lake Ohrid and Prespa are also in a borderland. They separate the worlds of Mediterranean Europe and the lands to the south. The lakes are survivors from a geotectonic depression which started perhaps five million years ago. The corrugations – rugged mountains and deep lakes of the Balkans - are the effect of the movement of vast tectonic plates which apply unimaginable pressures on the surface of the land.

Lake Ohrid is Europe’s oldest. How do we know that? Because of the variety of plants and animals which are found nowhere else. At the risk of boring you with Lake Ohrid facts, for its area, it is the most bio-diverse lake in the world. Species evolve at a certain rate, so the theory goes – it a bit like estimating the age of a hedgerow. So the unique waterweed and fishes are interesting in themselves but also suggest that Ohrid has been there for a million years. The lake never silts up. Although sediment is continually brought in by feeder streams, the restless earth sucks it away. They call it subduction.

Unfortunately, our own Loch Ness is rather short on aquatic life – too cold - so this method can’t be used to calculate its age but, naturally, being a good Scot, I believe that Loch Ness too conceals its own mysteries.

Lake Ohrid is the deepest lake of the Balkans. It is not the deepest lake in Europe - that distinction belongs to Loch Ness. Almost as beautiful and strange are the springs which constantly feed it. About 50% of its water comes in this way, from an underground system which links Prespa to Ohrid. This effect has a respectable scientific explanation; we are in karst country where water dissolves away rock to find underground channels. It disappears only to reappear miles away. From Celtic times, we Scots have found springs quite delightful, so allow me my little moment of wonder.

Southern Balkans, centred on Salonika/Thessaloniki circa 1920. Ohrid and Prespa are just west of Bitola. Courtesy Times Publishing

The water of lake Ohrid has two exits. The obvious one is the Black Drin River which flows through Albania to the Adriatic. There is another significant one that is  invisible. That is evaporation, which channels no less than 40% of the water away.

The lakes deserve to be better known – and the fact that they aren't, is a tragedy. They lie over the cultural and political fissures which divide the Balkans. At present, the western shores of Ohrid are Albanian, the eastern (roughly) in  the Republic of Macedonia (Former Yugoslavia. Lake Prespa is divided between RoM, Albania and Greece. Another block to them being better known is that they are also known as Ochrida and Presba.

This should not in itself be a problem. Lake Geneva, aka Lac Leman, has French shores and Swiss shores. Everyone gets along. People live on the French side and commute to the Swiss side. Tourists can enjoy both. Alas, tourists can’t easily take a boat and sail from one side of Ohrid to the other. Modern maps, so we are told, don’t even show both sides of the lake, which seems to float off into a misty neverland as you look from the shore.

Close-up of the area shows Presba/Presba and Ochrida/Ohrid. Salonika is to the south-east with Lake Lake Dojran due north of it. Snaking red national boundaries are very obvious. Courtesy Times Publishing

Its human history goes back millennia. From nearby, pottery has been found that is over seven THOUSAND years old. The decorations are as fine as anything produced by a modern artist. Tourists should also be inspired by ‘To The Lake: A Balkan Journey’ by Kapka Kassabova. As she puts it very kindly, history is still being made here - ancient tensions have still not been resolved.

Our maps, courtesy of Times Publishing, show the lakes circa 1920.

Another reason to visit is that Ohrid played a pivotal role in the Péchot story. True to character, it lay in a disputed no-man’s-land between the Allied Macedonian Front and the Bulgarian sector of the Central Powers. In every Front, generals attempted the breakthrough and on every Front, the usual result was stalemate. The German Spring Offensives of March/April 1918 came the nearest to punching through the British Front, but never quite succeded. After four years of war, the concept of breakthrough had acquired a mythical status. The Russian Front, it was true, had crumbled, but this was because of pressure from home rather than a knockout military blow.

It was here, in the unpromising and rugged Balkan terrain, that the stalemate was broken by the one true military breakthrough of the First World War. Yet the battle of Monastir is hardly remembered because the place has changed its name. Monastir has vanished from the map

(A bit of backstory) In 1915, the Bulgarians entered the War on the side of the Central Powers. Their incentive was Serbian territory. The Allies formed the Macedonian Front to oppose them. The British frontline, somewhat unwisely, followed the valley of the Struma river and its tributary the Strumitza. Their main enemies were mosquitoes carrying malaria which caused many more casualties than the Bulgarians. The French and Serbs were to their west, on a Front running from from Lake Dohran/Dojran to Prespa and Ohrid. It was, to put it mildly, rough ground. But there were no mosquitoes and the Serbs were almost in home territory. One big disadvantage was the lack of transport. There were few railways anyway and the north-south links had been cut by the Bulgarians.

Various designs of portable prefabricated track were used by both sides in the first world war. If they could, they used captured material, as these jumbled tracks suggest. Photo Malcolm Wright

 In 1916, the Serbian-French were fighting south of the little railway town of Florina, in the valley of the Echisu/Ekhisu, in the southern headwaters of the Varna river. Over the next couple of years they pushed their way north along the track of the railway towards Monastir (modern Bitola) to the south of Ohrid. How did they transport the big guns, and more importantly, the ammunition?

The traditional way was by mule, 70kg per mule, quite inadequate for modern warfare. The iron road had to return; a 60cm portable railway with its freight-carrying capacity. General Franchet d’Esperey, field commander, asked for daily reports on progress of the line down the Ekhisu valley, so highly did he esteem the value of 60cm. The final assault on Monastir/Bitola could not take place until 60cm was in place. By September 15^th 1918, all was ready.

The battle for Monastir/Bitola was savage, involving trains, guns, planes and old-fashioned cavalry charges. The breakthrough happened in the Cerna river valley. By September 20th, the hole in the Bulgarian defences was 25 km deep, by the 25th, well over 50 km. At the most northerly point of the breakthrough, Serbs were entering Istip (Ishtip). It was a classic breakthrough, the attackers making their way through the weak point and fanning outwards. The map is like a refractive pattern,  waves making their way through a weak point in a barrier and then spreading out.

The Balkan Front (double line) 15thSeptember 1918, centred on Monastir/Bitola, Ohrid and Prespa lying to the west.The broken lines show the stages of the breakthrough, successively 20th, 25th, 30th September and then 5th and 12th October. Illustration magazine Courtesy Malcolm Wright

The northern shore of Lake Ohrid was not taken until September 30^th. By then the Bulgarian Government had agreed an Armistice with the French, valid from midnight. At this point, the British troops roused themselves and started thrashing the Bulgarians. Given the situation, this was not quite cricket.

After the Bulgarian Armistice, it was only a matter of time before the collapse of the other Central Powers. In the words of Prosper Péchot’s proud son, all could be credited to his father’s railway inventions. Once the War was over, all the track and rolling stock were safely gathered into French military depots,

This area reappears in the Péchot story. During the Second World War, the Nazis confiscated all the French military material. Most was scrapped including almost all Péchot-Bourdon locomotives. Two survived the War, one being relocated to the Dresden area in what was then the DDR and one came to Pozega in what is now Serbia. This precious survivor spent more than 60 years a few kilometres north of Ohrid. This Serbian Péchot-Bourdon is in France for restoration – a treasure of history.

Rough country! After the breakthrough, French colonial troops take a Bulgarian position. Illustration magazine. Picture courtesy Malcolm Wright