Pogradec people (so-called Pogradecarë) are characterized by their willingness to please and host the guests from all over the world. This can be confirmed merely by being a visitor to any of the families in my city. The only way to really understand a country and its people is to be host in any of the families and live the life together.

Whenever you are a guest in Pogradec, you will be impressed by the unrepeatable and generous hospitality, which is also characteristic of the region in broad terms. We are delighted to proudly show our guests around to the nicest sights, and one of our favourite is the Monastery of Saint Naum. I feel in debt to this beautiful slice of paradise which has been honoured in front of my guests from all over the world and I have decided to summarize that here in few lines. It is called the Saint Naum of Ohrid but we proudly say our Saint Naum of Pogradec.

The History

The Monastery of Saint Naum is located on a rocky hill above the Lake Ohrid, only 7 kilometres to the south-west of the city of Pogradec and 29 kilometres to the south of the city of Ohrid, within the boundary of the village of Ljubaništa. The history has been spared for us through many decades, and the politics was the culprit.

The Monastery of Saint Naum and its land belonged to the Albanian state until 1925, when Zog the King of Albania ceded it to Yugoslavia as a result of negotiations between both countries to exchange some land. With the self-isolation of communist Albania, the politics definitively forebode us even from the mere chance to see the beauties of this spiritually rich site. My grandparents’ generation in Pogradec has told us about how important the monastery was for spiritual and community life, as a point of reference for all. It was connected with the coexistence of the populations on both sides of the border who lived one family and communicated in both languages, and had business, marriages and celebrations together. This beautiful tradition came to an end with the communist regime, and was re-commenced after the breakage of all the separating walls after 1991.

The Monastery Founder

The founder of the monastery is the medieval writer and teacher named Naum, who lived between 835-910 AD. He was one of the seven students of Thessalonica sainted brothers Cyril and Methodius, the inventors of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. Naum was a monk and in 893 he was appointed bishop and continued teaching in the Devoll region. Together with Saint Clement (of Ohrid) our Saint Naum guided the Ohrid Literary School with 3500 students for three decades until the year 916.

During his late age, St. Naum constructed a monastery dedicated to the holy archangels Gabriel and Michael on the south side of Lake Ohrid in the year 895. Saint Naum went to be with God on December 23^rd in the year 910. The Saint Naum grave is in a special chapel on the south side the church of the Archangels. The monastery from that period took His name.

The view around the monastery will make you feel that in this area the heavenly beauty really came down to the earth.

Architecture

The Church of the Holy Archangels is the central part of the monastery complex. Its foundation has the shape of a clover. The original monastery built by Saint Naum of Ohrid himself was taken down between the 11th and 13th century, during the Ottoman Empire invasion. The monastery was then rebuilt in the 16th century as the multi-domed Byzantine structure that you see today. Since the 16th century, a Greek school had functioned in the monastery. The monastery had close ties with Moscopole (Voskopojë), a prosperous Aromanian city in Albania at that era. Due to the presence of the first printing press in the Ottoman Balkans outside Istanbul, the village of Voskopojë (Moscopole), in the Korça region, developed into a short-lived but major center of Orthodox culture. This prominence, combined with the concurrent rise of the Archdiocese of Achrida (Ohrid), led to the spread of the following of Saint Naum in the first half of the 18th century.