Cavemen

HOTEL Izgrev, the venue for this year's world team senior championships, is on the shore of Lake Ohrid.

Leave the lobby, turn right and head down a short but steep slope, and you come to the Monastery of the Holy Mother of God, which is built on and beside a large rocky outcrop.

A little further on is the village of Kališta, after which the monastery is often named for short.

From there to the town of Struga is a paved path, with the lake on your right, often obscured by high reeds, and mountains on your left, which are several miles away.

But if you leave the hotel and head in the opposite direction, ie away from Struga and towards Albania, the scenery is rather different.

The lake is immediately on your left, and equally close on your right is continuous high ground, as if the mountains have come down to meet the lake, leaving just enough room for a single-track road.

What the two routes have in common is that after about five minutes you come to a 14th-century cave church.

The one towards Struga has been subsumed within the monastery complex, which boasts three more churches and an attractive courtyard, which I featured on Thursday (third, fourth and sixth photos).

I very much had to stoop to enter

Stairs are less steep than one might expect

The Byzantine frescos are apparently original and unrestored

This is on a ceiling, but I have rotated the image for easier viewing

More from the ceiling

The cave church heading away from Struga is dedicated to Saint Athanasius, who was Pope of the Coptic Church in Alexandria, Egypt, in the fourth century.

He is revered by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran and Assyrian communions, not least because he vigorously upheld the doctrine of the Holy Trinity against a rival dogma prosyletised by another leading Christina from Alexandria, Arius.

The niceties of their differences are all but hidden from modern Christians, but sparked huge controversies and much bloodshed in earlier centuries.

Saint Athanasius's cave-church is almost as obscure as his differences with the Arians

Entrance to the church with the saint's portrait above

This is by far the smaller of the two churches

Easily the smallest altar I have ever seen

Looking from the church across Lake Ohrid, with Hotel Izgrev in the middle-distance on the left