Struga

Struga sits where the Black Drin flows out of Lake Ohrid, which gives it something Ohrid does not have: a river running through the middle of the town, crossed by bridges with the lake at one end. It has been the home of the Struga Poetry Evenings since 1962, an international festival at which the Golden Wreath has gone to many of the significant poets of the last sixty years. The town lies within the inscribed Ohrid region.

History

In ancient times the lake region, including Enchalon, as Struga was then called, was home to the Illyrian Enchele and Dassaretii, and the Via Egnatia is believed to have passed west of it; the name Struga appears in a document of Tsar Dušan in the 14th century. In the 16th century the Venetian ambassador Lorenzo Bernardo found a place more like a village than a town, important for wheat shipments, with fertile plains and fine eel and trout, and the 19th-century traveller Henry Fanshawe Tozer, who compared the lake to the Italian lakes and the Sea of Galilee, called Struga the headquarters of the fishery in European Turkey, owned by the Sultan and sublet to locals for a large sum (Wikipedia, Struga).

The main sights

• The Drin outflow - the river leaving the lake through the middle of the town.
• The poetry festival - the Struga Poetry Evenings, running since 1962.
• The lakefront - the promenade and beaches at the river mouth.
• The bridges - the crossings over the Drin in the town centre.

When to go

May to September is the season. The poetry festival falls in late August. Summer weekends fill the lakefront.

Things to know

The town is less picturesque than Ohrid and much of it is modern. Beaches get crowded in August. Lake water quality varies along the shore.

Nearby

Ohrid is southeast, and Vevcani is west.

Key facts