The Matka Gorge and the Monastery Dormition of the Theotokos

Book-signing at the Ikona bookstores was the official business of the final day of “Days of Canadian Literature in Macedonia”, but our hosts made sure we got to see some of the countryside as well, with a trip out to the Matka Gorge. This is the deep ravine of the Treska River, which has a hydro dam on it from 1937, forming a lake further up the ravine. Beyond this, there are caves, at least one of which is among the deepest in Europe, though we didn’t go that far, as it entails a longish boat trip. (For photos, see the gallery at the end of this post.)

The steep-sided valley between the folded limestone mountains was home to a number of churches and monasteries in the Middle Ages. Some are still in use. The most accessible of these religious sites, more or less where the river leaves its gorge for wider terrain and heads towards its merging with the Vardar, is the monastery often just called the Matka Monastery, but dedicated to “the Dormition of the Theotokos”, the Eastern Orthodox feast commemorating the death and bodily resurrection of Mary. The church there dates to the fourteenth century, as do some of its frescoes, but some stones from much earlier Christian buildings were reused in it. The present monastic establishment, which was founded in 1998, is home to half a dozen nuns and an elderly woman who has retired to the monastery. “We are seven,” the sister who was our host there said, which sounds like the start of a Wordsworth quote. We became guests for of the monastery for a little while that afternoon because one of the sisters is a friend of one of the festival organizers; we were invited around back of the monastery for Turkish coffee and cakes, with a view of a small grassy meadow rising into a hillside of steep woodland and stone, while hens foraged among the daisies under the watchful eye of the monastery dog. Birds, the only one of which I could identify by sound was a European blackbird, sang, and the noise of the crowds which had fled Skopje on a day of 34 degree heat and brilliant sun was shut away down on the thronged road along the river. Though I was enjoying very much the many and varied events of the past day and a half, it was a very restorative oasis of calm and stillness in the rush and anxiety of so much of that week of travel.

Guests often stay at the monastery. It would be a place very conducive to the concentration required for writing, I think, and is the sort of environment I try to create for myself at home when I’m working, though the lawn-mowing arms race in the neighbourhood doesn’t do much for peace and quiet. In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when the monastery was a foundation for men, it is known to have had a very good library.

The nineteenth-century monastery building reminded me of illustrations of an Elizabethan inn, with a gallery running along the upper floor and a veranda beneath, a similarity added to by the white plaster and dark beams we think of as Tudor. The masonry of the small, domed, cruciform church is brick and stone with very thick mortar making an attractive pattern. The ancient stone incorporated into it includes portions of columns, pillars, and part of an altar as well. The paraclisis for votive candles is modern, dating only to 2002, but was built to echo the style of the church. The small guide one of the sisters gave me says that it also incorporates part of an ancient Christian altar. There is also a freestanding bell-tower, though I don’t know how old that is.

Down below the monastery is the road along the river, which turns into a path with a low guardrail, heading upriver. Photography is forbidden around the hydro dam, but there are quite enough spectacular views without that. The low mountains, folded and warped layers of grey limestone, are scattered with green and flashes of mauve where the lilacs are in bloom. The river was still in spate with the spring freshet off the higher mountains where snow still lingered. There were a lot of trees I didn’t recognize: some species of juniper or cypress with quite large cones, something that looked like a fig … Dejan said it wasn’t good to eat but that you made jam out of it; he only knew the Macedonian name, which I wrote down to look up later, discovering that it looked like a fig because it was a fig. Hunting around online turned up the suggestion that the figs that have gone wild in the southern parts of the Balkans originated with trees planted around monasteries and mosques. Figs and lilacs, an unlikely combination. The lilacs were mostly on the far shore of the lake above the hydro dam, though, so I don’t have any good pictures of them.

We saw another ancient church, that of the monastery of Saint Andrew. It also dates from the fourteenth century and contains medieval frescoes.

Three of us left the other two having coffee at the outdoor café down below Saint Andrew’s and walked a fair ways along the increasingly-narrow path above the lake, which twists around jutting shoulders of stone and sometimes passes beneath low overhangs where tall people need to duck. When we turned around to the head back, the light was getting lower, showing up the layers and folds in the stone even more sharply than before.

It was one of the most memorable parts of a memorable trip.

* * *

Quite a number of people helped make my attendance at the launch of the Macedonian translation of Torrie and the Pirate-Queen possible. The Canada Council for the Arts assisted with a travel grant; the trip could not have happened at all without that. The translator of the Macedonian Torrie books, Marija Todorova, and my Macedonian publisher Vermilion did splendid work in bringing another Torrie out and in organizing, and then re-organizing, a book launch. Dejan and Nikola from Ikona were unfailingly considerate and helpful hosts and made the trip a huge success for me. The new friends I made, David Chariandy, Aleksandar Prokopiev, Elizabeta Seleva, and all the folks from the NGO Sumnal, are also a part of the trip that will stay with me. Furthermore, various friends and relatives at home helped out in various ways — you know who you are. Благодарам.

* * *

No thanks at all to the corporate entity Air Canada. One does not just pop over to the Balkans for the weekend.

High water on the Treska River.

A fig (smokva) growing wild in the Matka gorge. Late April.

Can anyone identify this species for me?

The medieval church at the Matka Monastery.

Carved stone from an ancient church several centuries older than the fourteenth-century one, the wall of which now houses it.

Another piece of early Christian stonecarving incorporated into the fourteenth-century church.

The monastery, Matka.

K.V. Johansen and David Chariandy, Canadian authors looking a bit solemn in the courtyard of the monastery at Matka.

The modern paraclisis sheltering votive candles at the Matka Monastery.

The steep limestone hills that loom over the gorge.

A glimpse of the spillway and hydro dam that create Lake Matka on the Treska River.

Fourteenth-century monastery church of St. Andrew, Matka.

David and Nikola on the path along the headpond of the hydro dam at Matka.

Folded layers of limestone that have been tilted to the vertical along the Matka Gorge.

Тори и пиратската кралица – The Macedonian Torrie and the Pirate-Queen.

Heading home, out of Istanbul on Turkish Airlines: the shore of the Black Sea. Eastward of the Black Sea is the landscape of Blackdog and Marakand.

Dining in the Republic of Macedonia

I think the foods of all the southern areas of Eastern Europe are related, from the similarity in climate, which affects not only what grows well, but how foods were traditionally preserved and stored, and from the shared history of the late medieval Turkish conquest and subsequent centuries of Ottoman rule. The names, though, can differ from country to country and each region has many of its own specialities as well as its own twists on the shared dishes.

This trip to the Republic of Macedonia, at the end of April, was timed nicely for the start of the outdoor eating season, when in Skopje the householders have moved out to their gardens and the restaurants and coffeehouses have flowed out to patios and streetsides. Though I was only there for three evenings or two full days, my memory of it, in between book-related events and tours around interesting parts of the city and surrounding countryside, is of a lot of eating, more than seems possible to have fitted into such a short visit!

Garden of the Hotel Aleksandar

From a long, leisurely post-breakfast coffee with the night-desk clerk from the Hotel Aleksandar (the one on Vostanicka) under the larches in their garden, the morning I accidentally set my alarm on Istanbul time and got up an hour before I needed to, to several evenings out with Dejan and company, it’s clear that Macedonians make eating a time to relax and enjoy oneself. It’s not something to be rushed through, to get on to the next phase of the day. Lunch is late, closer to two than noon, and supper is likewise later in the evening, around seven or eight.

Dejan Trajkoski and Nikola Madeshovski took David Chariandy and me to a number of different restaurants serving traditional Macedonian fare, with a varying array of other guests, who were writers, publishers, and academics living in Skopje. Each time, rather than ordering individual meals, we had a large array of different dishes to share. I didn’t get the names of many of them, but there were salads of tomato and cucumber covered with a grated white cheese, the sauces pindjur and ajvar, based on red peppers (which we used to be able to buy at the grocery store here, but the Superstore decided we Maritimes didn’t need such exotic foodstuffs and stopped stocking them a couple of years ago — traditionally eaten with bread, they make a good sauce for homemade pizza), flatbread, grilled “beaten” cheese, which doesn’t melt, several other white sheep cheeses, platters of roasted vegetables, salty kebabs sprinkled with hot pepper flakes, a soured cream, the paprika-flavoured baked bean dish tavche gravche (тавче гравче), roasted mushrooms, curried chicken and mushrooms (okay, I admit that one is probably not native to Balkan cuisine, but it was very good), and more tomato and cucumber dishes. I also tried an excellent lentil soup on one occasion, had Macedonian-style yoghurt which was the best ‘Trinkjoghurt’ I’ve ever had, and was introduced to a bagel-like (in that it is annular), sesame-seed-coated bread called gyevrek (ѓеврек), a variant of the Turkish simik spread throughout the former Ottoman empire. I’m going to have a go at making gyevrek someday soon.

There are only a couple of types of Macedonian beer, according to Dejan, and on this trip I didn’t sample any; the large bottles of zlaten dav (златен дав) or Golden Oak looked like a daunting quantity for someone running on hardly any sleep. My notebook records that it is a “non fizzy wild” — or possibly that is meant to be “non-fizzy mild” lager, according to Dejan. I’m all in favour of non-fizzy ale and beer, though I lean more to the dark side. However, I tried several Macedonian wines. On my last trip I had been really impressed with the wines produced in Macedonia. They seem very rich, nicely complex in flavour. The Spouse and I tend to rate wines as either complex and interesting, or thin. Any Macedonian ones I’ve tried have definitely fallen in the rich and complex category. I didn’t rediscover the particular excellent red I bought at random in a grocery store for my hosts last time, though I remember it was said to be made from a grape variety indigenous to the region, but I had a very interesting red wine regardless. It was a Vranec (in English; it’s spelt бранец so I think would be pronounced more like vranets– with the ts a bit plosive as in tsar) named T’ga za jug, a wine I was told (I think — it was late, I was exhausted, and my notes are a bit sketchy) had been named by contemporary Macedonian poet Bogomil Gjazel after a poem by a famous nineteenth-century poet of the region, Konstantin Miladinov. The name means “Longing for the south”. (The poem was written while Miladinov was in exile in Russia.) We also had a white wine, a Riesling from the company Alexandria, which was excellent as well. No, we weren’t drinking wine all evening. That was another occasion entirely. (I mean, the Riesling was another occasion. There was no drinking-all-evening occasion; the Macedonian evening of dining out does not involve copious drinking.) But to continue the alcoholic theme for another sentence, I also tried rakia for the first time. Also very nice!

The interior of Old City House, showing off the beams and plaster: Elizabeta, me, David, Nikola.

Although nearly every meal I ate in Macedonia was served outside, on the second evening five of us ate at the Old City House restaurant, the architecture of which shows what a traditional Macedonian house would have been like. There was a courtyard, but we were in a room of dark wooden beams and white plaster. Elizabeta drew my attention to the ceilings, which she said were decorated with wooden intarsia work in a traditional style. There were many antique oil lamps and other items decorating the rooms as well.

Ceiling, Old City House Restaurant, Skopje.

The final evening was a gathering of many of the people David and I had spent the preceding couple of days with, Dejan, Nikola, Dr. Elizabeta Seleva, Dr. Aleksandar Prokopiev and his wife, and a number of others. It was a long, leisurely meal with much conversation in several different languages. (Actually, at one lunch in the Old City I ended up speaking English, German, French, and my few words of Macedonian in short succession, and there was Albanian being spoken among those at the table as well.) Conversations ranged over poetry, what to feed pet rabbits, the current political situation in Macedonia, the National Post and their “nobody noticed” proclamation about the Macedonian president’s visit to Canada (rather embarrassing, when at the same time David and I were national news over there), and a complicated effort, with drawings, to work out what the Macedonian word for dandelion was. I seem to have omitted to write it down. (An earlier effort to figure out what the English for some peculiar-looking beast with large mouse-ears — my interlocutor was a poet, not an artist — concluded it was a musk-ox. Probably.) I came away from it all with the feeling that this is what a gathering of thinking people should be like — and also, the conclusion that I really like Macedonian cheese. And wine. And curried mushrooms.

And of course, ajvar and pindjur, which, you will notice once I finally get that long-promised next Torrie book written, Wren and Torrie develop a taste for while Wren is apprenticed to Rookfeather in Callipepla.

In the next post, I’ll finally be getting some of my many photos of the Matka Gorge up.

Skopje: The Old City, Сули ан and Чифте-амам

Even though my originally-planned booklaunch on the Friday of my trip had to be cancelled, Marija from my Macedonian publisher, Vermilion, had already set up a second reading for Saturday with a Roma organization, the NGO Sumnal. The visit with the children at Sumnal thus became the official launch of Тори и пиратската кралица. That was a really enjoyable morning, which I wrote about in my previous post. I’m really glad I had a chance to meet and talk with these kids,. After my visit to Sumnal, I joined David Chariandy and the others for an Albanian-language event introducing the Albanian translation of his book Soucouyant at the bookstore/coffeehouse Libraria e çarshisë in the Old Bazaar. After a long Macedonian outdoor lunch — more about food another time — Dejan, Nikola of Ikona, David and I met up with several others, including Dr. Elizabeta Seleva and Dr. Aleksandar Prokopiev, to see the Old City. Aleksandar, by the way, is a great champion of the Torrie books in Macedonian and spoke about them very passionately at the reception I wasn’t able to attend. (Thanks, it can’t be said often enough, to Air Canada deciding for no unavoidable reason at all to delay the first of my chain of three connecting flights for hours, so that I only reached Toronto as my flight to Istanbul was leaving without me.)

The river Vardar cuts through Skopje; most of the modern city lies to the south, while to the north is the Old City, which still shows the influence of many centuries of Ottoman rule in its architecture. In the oldest part, you walk through a web of narrow, crooked streets; it’s very much an evolved rather than a planned layout. Some of the cobbled lanes go up and down flights of steps. Cafes and bars spill outdoors; in the fine weather, everyone gathers outside to eat, drink, and socialize. None of the shops, with flats over them, are very large, and some are lower than modern street level.

A typical street in the Old City section of Skopje.

It’s very much how I imagine the neighbourhoods of Marakand, the city where the eastern and western caravan roads meet in Blackdog, give or take the motorcycles. Like Marakand, Skopje has a history of earthquakes as well. The most recent bad one was in 1963, which destroyed much of the city and resulted in a lot of Eastern Bloc concrete going up in the modern sections. Many historic buildings were badly damaged then and have since been restored as well. However, you don’t get the feeling that the Old City is a fossil, a carefully-preserved display for tourists, the way some old places (downtown St. Andrew’s-By-the-Sea, for instance — very pretty, but the locals all shop in the neighbouring town of St. Stephen) can become; it’s still very much a living neighbourhood, concerned with its own affairs.

A street in the Old City, unusually empty of people, showing an old iron balcony.

The danger in that, of course, is that as the republic becomes more prosperous, there will be a rush to modernize and many of the oldest everyday buildings, some of which are now in very poor repair or abandoned, will be torn down rather than restored and kept in use.

An unusual view of a minaret.

Dejan and Nikola were taking us to the Čifte Amam National Art Gallery, Чифте-амам, located in a hammam or Turkish bathhouse.

Some of our party heading into Čifte Amam.

My Bradt guidebook says it is early sixteenth century, commissioned by Isa Bey, but Wikipedia and other online sources date it to the mid fifteenth century. The mid fifteenth-century date makes more sense, since Isa Bey is İshakoğlu İsa Bey or Isa-Beg Isaković, who governed the Sanjak of Üsküb/Skopje from 1454-1463, right after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Čifte Amam

This is one of two hammams in the Old City that are now art galleries. Before we went in, though, Aleksandar beckoned me aside and we went off for a private excursion. He wanted me to see the Suli An.

When I was in Skopje in 2010, I visited the City Museum in the old train station, with its Roman sarcophagi outside and its clock stopped at the moment of the 1963 earthquake, and the National Museum with its fascinating overview of the history of the area from the Neolithic onwards. I also saw the Ottoman fortress, built on a site, the strategic location of which has been utilized since at least the 2nd century B.C. and probably before. (Unfortunately, the site of Kale is now (2013) caught up in an ethnic/religious dispute and is closed to visitors.) On that trip, I also visited the Kuršumli An, a sixteenth-century Ottoman trading inn — a caravanserai — which is part of the National Museum. At that time, I was just about to submit Blackdog to Pyr; it was on my list of “things to do when I get home”, in fact. (Good thing I did stick to my list. Blackdog, with its caravanserais, its gods, goddessess, devils, and demons, was published by Pyr in 2011.)

Kuršumli An when I visited it in 2010.

Seeing the reality of something I had only researched was a thrill; it confirmed some details I had made up because they seemed logical. I had written about it on my website at the time and now Aleksandar wanted to make sure I had a chance to see another of Skopje’s caravanserais.

The Suli An, Сули ан, (“an” is the Turkish “han”, an inn), which like the nearby hammam was also built on the orders of Isa Bey, houses part of a university’s fine arts space and a museum about the bazaar, but the gatehouse and courtyard still preserve the look of the original architecture, though it was severely damaged in the 1963 earthquake and restored thereafter. (Just ignore the big glassed-in windows in the archways.)

The Suli An in 2013.

After that, he took me to an antique shop in the Old Bazaar, full of all sorts of interesting oddments. Later, on a second visit, I would buy an old brass coffee mill there, which we find grinds much more nicely than our electric one.

Back at the hammam, we rejoined the others.

A roving gang of publishers, writers, and academics hanging out in the Čifte Amam.

There were a couple of interesting exhibitions in the galleries, but what interested me most was when Aleksandar showed me into a room that had been restored more to what it would have been, with some original artefacts, the fountains that were along the walls, sections of clay water-pipe and the like, rather than turned into gallery space.

One of the fountains in the Čifte Amam.

One thing that struck me (luckily not literally, though it’s a hazard for us tall people), is how very low and narrow many of the original doorways are.

A doorway between rooms in the Čifte Amam National Art Gallery. Note the art!

The quality of the sound under the large domes changes quite dramatically depending on your position. It’s details like that that you don’t pick up from reading.

The truants, Dr. Aleksandar Prokopiev and I, reach the bathhouse at last.

Our next visit was to the nearby Monastery of Sveti Spas. The site has had a monastery on it since before the Ottoman conquest, but the church within the courtyard is built partially underground, like a Grubenhaus, because during the Ottoman era a Christian church was not allowed to be higher than a mosque; they excavated and built down, to allow for the height of a bell-tower. The current church is said to date from the 16th century, although it was apparently renovated extensively during the 19th and 20th centuries. There’s a very beautiful carved wooden iconostasis (which separates the nave from the sanctuary) made in the early nineteenth century. No photography is allowed in churches, so you’ll just have to imagine what it’s like, in the low light: an entire wall of small, densely-packed figures in high relief, worked in some polished dark wood (walnut, maybe?), depicting scenes from the Bible and from eastern hagiography, with coiling vines, flowers, and trees binding it all together.

Further posts are to come, talking about Macedonian food and Matka!

Macedonia at last

Well, here I am, starting my second (and last) day in Macedonia. I calculate that by the time I return I will have spent more time standing in queues in airports than on foreign soil (if one disregards the fact that some of these queues have been on foreign soil), but no matter, I am here.

Sunset over Macedonia

It’s been an extremely busy trip so far. I arrived in the evening and went out for supper with Dejan Trajkoski, the event organizer, fellow Canadian author David Chariandy, Nikola Madeshovski from Ikona, and Dr. Elizabeta Sheleva.

David Chariandy and myself, in Macedonia at last.

They had had a busy first day, with the reception with the Canadian Ambassador to Serbia and the introduction of the books being promoted, the Albanian-language translation of David’s Soucouyant and the Macedonian-language translation of my Torrie and the Pirate-Queen. Rumour has it (well, David told me), that Dr. Aleksandar Prokopiev spoke about Torrie with great enthusiasm, so I was well-represented and championed even in my absence.

Unfortunately, due to the much-delayed flight (and it turns out it wasn’t fog but merely organizational problems that the airline knew about in advance and I think therefore should have informed me of and changed my flight to an earlier one, since my connection was on record — they have no excuse), the planned reading and book launch with schoolchildren from Skopje on Friday had to be cancelled. However, on Saturday morning I visited the NGO Sumnal, a charity which works with Roma children, and so the official introduction of the Macedonian Torrie and the Pirate-Queen took place there instead.

The Roma flag: a cartwheel against grass and sky.

The kids were a great audience and my young translator did an excellent job. Although they were very shy, the children did ask a lot of questions and I think we all enjoyed ourselves immensely. They wanted to know if I had tried Macedonian food; I was able to tell them that yes, the organizers had been taking me to restaurants for lot of traditional Macedonian foods and that I even made tavche gravche (a baked-bean type dish with paprika rather than molasses and mustard) at home. They laughed a lot at this; turns out that their thank-you gift to me was a little earthenware dish traditionally used for tavche gravche.

After that, I rejoined Dejan, Nikola, and David at an Albanian-language bookstore/cafe in the Old Bazaar, where we were presented at an Albanian-language event focussed on the translation of David’s book. We spent a lot of time touring the Old City with Dejan, Nikola, Elizabeta Sheleva, and Alexander Prokopiev.

A typical view in the Old City.

I think I’ll write up that as a separate post later, with lots of photos. A caravanserai, a bathhouse, a medieval church … it needs its own space.

An Ottoman bath-house, now an art gallery. More photos of the Old City to come in a separate post!

After a book-signing at an Ikona store, we went out for another traditional Macedonian meal at the “Old City House” restaurant.

Here is some Macedonian coverage of the first day of the event. (The day I missed thanks to Air Canada.)
> From the news site Vecher
> From another news site
> And from an arts and culture website.

Going nowhere, slowly

Well, the Macedonian expedition is not off to a very good start. My flight from Moncton was delayed by a couple of hours; I still don’t know why. Fog? But it got in just when the flight to Istanbul was leaving. I could hear myself being paged. I told the Air Canada flunky at the gate I was here, asked where to go. She told me. I went. It was a flight to Halifax that had already gone. I went back. She gave me new directions. I ran. I ran for I don’t know how long; long enough to trigger off the asthsma that’s been in abeyance for years and end up wheezing and faint at the gate. Security of some sort had opened a door and waved me through. The Turkish ticket people had seen me coming, taken my boarding pass, told me to breathe (having a few problems with that at the time), and told me my baggage would not arrive with me. Then they were told tough luck, she’s not gettng on. About five minutes later, four other people showed up, from two other late Air Canada connecting flights.

And thus our epic journey began, not not to Istanbul, but in quest of someone, anyone, who could actually do something useful. Air Canada said “Oh well,” and gave everyone a hotel chit and a gosh, ten dollar meal chit, telling us the meal places were probably closed. They could not rebook our flights. No, we had to do that by going to a bank of white phones. Did I mention that we were sent to several different Air Canada desks before that bit of information was conveyed to us?

We were also supposed to go and get our baggage off the domesitc carosel. Tickets first, we all thought. It took several hours on the phone. I don’t think I’m exaggerating, because of the hour at which we finally reached the hotel. Something must have happened in that time. Many things, in fact, happened. The desks shut down. The cleaners began to throw chemicals on the floor, wearing breathing masks and whirling away with giant chemical-whirlers, occasionally coming over to tell us to all go away. This we politely refused to do, as some of us were getting through.

One lady had no common language with any of the rest of us, except that she understood a very little French. I discovered I could, in a pinch, speak a very little that did not have too much German mixed in, and that was what we got by on, until one of the others helped her reach a Russian speaking AC phone flunkie. After a couple of hours, and various calls on the gentlemen’s cell phones to the relatives of the lady we couldn’t really say anything complex too, we were all assured our tickets were fixed up for flights the next day.

(This means I am missing the launch of the Macedonian translation of Torrie and the Pirate-Queen with the schoolchildren of Skopje, as well as the reception with the Canadian Ambassador to Serbia and some philology professors.)

We then attempted to retrieve our luggage. Although a baggage chap did his best, we were kindly assured that the Air Canada person didn’t know what she was talking about and our baggage was not about to show up because everyone had gone home to bed, come back in the morning. Oh, and they couldn’t find the baggage of the lady who didn’t speak English or French, though the rest of us were assured our baggage existed, somewhere else.

So, we found the hotel shuttle. This was getting on for two a.m. local time. The hotel had no rooms. They found rooms, after a fashion. I had a suite with gold-plated (well, it was trying to look that way) taps, but no hot water except in the sink. The couple ended up letting themselves into a room that was already occupied. Another gentleman had a room that was out of service due to decaying food in the fridge, apparently, but it was that or the couch in the lobby. But at least we weren’t camped in Pearson. Plus, they gave me toothpaste. I can forgive a lot for that. It was hardly their fault Air Canada didn’t check on whether any rooms actually existed.

Come morning, all bags but one appeared. We decended in force upon the baggage people and after some phoning, our party of waifs’ last bag appeared. We descended upon Air Canada to claim our promised tickets. The couple got through no problem, but the other three of us all had difficulties, apparently engendered by the call centre people. The last two of us stuck with the lady who didn’t speak English and eventually an Air Canada person who was doing his honest best found someone on the phone who could explain the details of his efforts to her. Some of us had to go away and wait and come back later when other airlines people would be answering their phones. In my case, the problem was that the call centre person appeared to have cancelled the Skopje to Istanbul leg of my return flight. Since I can’t teleport and am not about to hike across the Balkans, whatever Patrick Leigh Fermor may once have done in differently interesting times, I felt this perhaps ought to be resolved.

Meanwhile, we last two got our non-Canadian friend’s ticket problems sorted, thanks to the one helpful Air Canada chap who worked into his lunch hour to do it and found us in yet another lineup to give it to her. We saw her to get her boarding pass and to security. I hope the rest of her trip is uneventful. Next time, I expect her family will be instructed to come visit her, none of this sending tickets!

And much after that, I persuaded someone at Air Canada that perhaps I needed to be able to fly out of Skopje and that as they had cancelled it, they could darn well uncancel it. They allege they have done so. The proof, unfortunately, awaits the transformation of a Lufthansa lineup into a Turkish lineup, which hasn’t happened yet. Two more hours to go before I can join yet another queue and find out if, just maybe, I will be flying to Istanbul tonight and on to Skopje.

And back. Let’s not forget back.

What none of the five castaways understand is that we all had connecting flights; we were all on their computers; they are all allied airlines. They knew were were en route. They knew our planes were arriving just at the departure time. Waiting ten for fifteen minutes for us to run the length or breadth or round and round or wahtever it was of Pearson would not have delayed that flight significantly at all. The planes were all several hours late; they had ample warning of the situation. We could have informed at our plane-exiting of where to go (correctly, mind you. In my case, the misdirection probably made that one minute’s difference). None of this was necessary at all. It has caused entirely undue stress to a lady alone in a foreign land, caused lots of problems for others, ruined plans for the most important parts of a literary festival that many people have been working very hard at, and investing much time and money in, since last June.

At least we all made some new friends. I hope I, or anyone else lost and alone in a foriegn land without any common tongue to get by on, can find such a gang to stand by them in our turn.

With luck, I will be off for two days in Macedonia in another few hours. I’m afraid my efforts to learn Macedonian are not going to do me much good. I’m exhausted and have been trying to think intermittantly in French for the past many hours, to the point that when I accidentally ran a trolley into the luggage of a man speaking Chinese, I apologized in French. I guess it’s temporarily been elevated to default foreign language, though I notied in the last hour or so that German is being to reassert itself.

Anyway, that’s my update for now. We still have a reading at a Roma children’s charitable group scheduled, so I will get to meet some children and introduce them to Torrie. I will have spent more time travelling than being there, though.

Pearson International, in my opinion, is one of the lower circles of hell.

Blackdog ebooks

A couple of people have pointed out to me that the Blackdog ebooks disappeared outside of the US for a while. I checked with Pyr and that problem has been fixed. Here are the new, updated links for the ebook editions.

Blackdog at Kobo

Blackdog at Amazon UK

Blackdog at Amazon Canada

And Blackdog at Amazon US and Barnes and Noble, which are the same links as before.

Torrie and the Dragonslayers ebook

It’s been a very good week for Torrie. First the Macedonian translation of Torrie and the Pirate-Queen, Тори и пиратската кралица, came out, and now the ebook edition of Torrie and the Dragonslayers is available through Kobo (and probably a few other places as well).

Dragonslayers (2009) is the completely new retelling of my very first book, Torrie and the Dragon, from long, long ago. (Well, 1997 seems like long, long ago.) As I say in the introduction, it’s not merely revised, but retold, as though you’re listening to a different night of storytelling in the Wild Forest and Torrie is putting in all the things he left out the first time. The ebook edition contains a bonus short story as well, “How Torrie met Cossypha”.