Ten days in Serbia and North Macedonia: two capitals nobody photographs, and a lake everyone should

Begin at Republic Square, the place the whole city arranges to meet: a horseman on a plinth, the national collection on one side and the theatre on the other, and everybody saying they will see you by the horse.

From there, take the pedestrian street that runs northwest. Knez Mihailova is a nineteenth century shopping street laid along the line of a Roman road, with plane trees, buskers and cafe tables, and it runs a kilometre straight into the fortress gates.

On the way, step into the Orthodox cathedral of 1840, a plain neoclassical box with a heavily gilded interior, where the two men who made modern written Serbian are buried in front of the door.

Then Kalemegdan, which is a fortress and a public park at once: Roman foundations under Ottoman walls under Austrian gates, and, at the point of the bluff, the Sava emptying into the Danube with New Belgrade beyond it. People come up here to walk, play chess and watch the sun go down. Do the same.

Dinner afterwards in Skadarlija, the cobbled street of nineteenth century taverns, where the accordion is not optional.

Three of the largest things in the city, in one arc south from the centre.

The temple of Saint Sava stands on the hill where, in 1595, an Ottoman commander burned the relics of the saint who founded the Serbian church. Three centuries later they began building the largest Orthodox church in the country on the spot: work started in 1935, stopped for the war and most of communism, and the interior was only finished in the last few years with forty million pieces of gold mosaic under a dome that was assembled on the ground and jacked into place in one piece. It is free, and the crypt is arguably better than the church.

Then Tesla. The museum holds his papers, his instruments and, in a gilded sphere, his ashes, which came back from New York in 1957. Visits are guided and hands-on: somebody fires up a coil and gives you a fluorescent tube that lights in mid air. Check the times before you go.

In the afternoon, the Museum of Yugoslavia. Tito is buried under a white marble slab in a glasshouse called the House of Flowers, with his residence next door and four decades of state gifts around it: swords, ivory, moon rock, an unreasonable amount of taxidermy. The strangest room holds hundreds of relay batons, carried across the country every year by young people to arrive on his official birthday.

Zemun is half an hour from the centre and was a foreign country within the lifetime of its buildings. Until 1918 the frontier of Austria-Hungary ran along the water here, and this was the last Habsburg town before the Ottoman world began on the other bank. It still looks it: low pastel houses, baroque churches, a fish market and a promenade.

Climb the hill behind it to the tower, put up in 1896 for the thousandth anniversary of the Hungarian conquest and left behind when the border moved. From the top you get the Danube, the confluence, the concrete towers of New Belgrade and the old city's bluff in one turn.

Lunch on the quay, where the fish restaurants are, then walk or take a bus south along the river to the modern art museum at the point where the two rivers meet: a 1965 arrangement of glass crystals in a park, holding a century of art from across the old federation, and almost always empty.

The evening belongs to the water. Barges moored along both rivers become bars and clubs from May onwards and the whole city ends up on them. Ask somebody under thirty which one is good this summer, because the answer changes every year.

Take a morning coach. Belgrade to Skopje is seven or eight hours down the Morava and Vardar valleys, with a border stop in the middle, and it is the price of doing this route overland. Bring water and something to read. Overnight services exist and save a day at the cost of a night.

You arrive at a bus station ten minutes from the main square, and the square is where to start, because there is a great deal going on. Before 1963 it was lined with neoclassical buildings; the earthquake took nearly all of them; the rebuilding put concrete in their place; and the 2010s put the neoclassicism back as facades over the concrete, with fountains, columns and an enormous bronze warrior on a horse in the middle. He is officially called Warrior on a Horse and unofficially called Alexander the Great, for reasons involving a dispute with Greece that was settled in 2018 by changing the country's name.

North of the square the Stone Bridge crosses the Vardar. It has stood in some form since at least the fifteenth century, is over two hundred metres long on a dozen arches, and survived the earthquake when almost nothing else did. Cross it in the evening: the bazaar and the fortress ahead, the ministries behind, and that is the argument of this city in one walk.

Eat in Debar Maalo, a quarter of low houses ten minutes west of the square, which is where the city actually goes for dinner.

Cross the bridge early and climb into the bazaar. It has been the commercial quarter since at least the twelfth century, it is the largest surviving Ottoman bazaar in the Balkans outside Istanbul, and it is not a museum: coppersmiths, tailors, gold shops, tea houses, a fish market, backgammon in doorways. The earthquake damaged it and it was rebuilt as it had been.

Start at the lead inn, the grandest of the three surviving caravanserais, built in 1550 around a double gallery of arches where merchants stabled animals below and slept above. It is a museum and a courtyard now, and it is the most beautiful space in the city.

Above the bazaar on a plateau stands the mosque of 1492, built by a vizier of Sultan Selim, elegant, unaltered and open to visitors outside prayer times, with a walled burial garden and a terrace over the old roofs.

Then the fortress. Kale sits on the highest ground in the valley, its oldest walls built of great squared blocks, and it is free: grass, ramparts, excavated towers, and the whole city below with Vodno behind it. Go up in the last hours of the afternoon.

Eat in the bazaar. Grilled meat, salad, bread and tea afterwards, for the price of a coffee at home.

Skopje's real advantage over other capitals is that you can be somewhere spectacular twenty minutes after leaving your hotel.

Go west first. Matka is a gorge on the Treska river, dammed in the 1930s so the water sits deep and green between limestone walls, with a path cut along one side and a fourteenth century monastery at the entrance. Hire a kayak, or take a boat to the mouth of the cave at the far end, which is one of the deepest underwater cave systems found in Europe and is still being surveyed. Take a swimming costume.

In the afternoon go the other way. A cable car climbs the last stretch of Vodno in a few minutes to a summit just above the thousand metre mark, and the walk up from the middle station takes ninety minutes through oak woods if you would rather earn it.

On top is a steel cross 66 metres high, put up in 2002 for two thousand years of Christianity, lit at night and visible from every street in the city, with a lift inside and a cafe beside it. Stay for the light going down, then come back for a long dinner.

Pack tonight. The bus to Ohrid leaves early and fills up.

Three hours southwest through the mountains, and you arrive at a lake that has been here for a couple of million years, deep enough to hold species found nowhere else, and warm enough on the surface to swim in from June.

Start at Saint Sofia, the most important building in the town, which looks from outside like a barn with a Renaissance porch on the front. It was built in the middle of the eleventh century as the cathedral of the archbishopric, given its gallery and towers in 1317, and spent the Ottoman centuries as a mosque, which is why its eleventh century frescoes were plastered over and therefore survived.

Climb into the lanes and you reach the theatre, cut into the hillside around 200 BC, buried, built over and only found in the 1980s when a house came down. The lower tiers survive and it is used for concerts again in summer.

Spend the end of the day walking down the far side of the hill to Kaneo. The church is small, thirteenth or fourteenth century, stone and brick with a zigzag pattern under the roof, standing on a rock directly above the water with nothing else around it. There is a ladder into the lake below it, so bring a towel.

Walk back along the lit boardwalk under the cliff and eat by the harbour.

Take a boat from the harbour in the morning. It is ninety minutes down the eastern shore, past cliffs and coves, to the far end of the lake where a monastery stands on a bluff a few hundred metres from the Albanian border.

Naum was a colleague of Clement and founded the place around the year 905. He is buried in the church, and visitors still put an ear to the tomb because you are supposed to be able to hear his heart. The building is small and dark, painted in the nineteenth century over much older work, with peacocks strutting round the grounds as though they own them, which they do.

Below it are the springs. Something like forty five separate sources push out of the ground, cold and so clear that the sand can be seen boiling two metres down, feeding a set of pools joined by channels through the reeds. Boatmen row you round them in flat-bottomed punts for a few euros, which takes twenty minutes and is worth every one. Then swim off the beach below the monastery.

Come back by road in the late afternoon and stop halfway, where a Bronze Age pile village has been rebuilt on the water on its original piles: thatched huts on a platform on stilts, with a museum and a rebuilt Roman post on the shore behind.

One small hill this morning, with three things on it.

Plaosnik is the archaeological terrace above the theatre and has been a religious site since early Christian times: a fifth century basilica with mosaic floors sits under cover, and over its foundations stands the rebuilt church where Clement is buried. It was here, from around 886, that he ran a school teaching in the Slavic vernacular, produced the priests who spread it, and, in the hands of that circle, gave the alphabet the form it still has. Ohrid calls this the first university in Europe. Whatever you make of the label, the thing underneath it is real.

Above it the fortress walls run along the ridge. They belong to Tsar Samuel, who made Ohrid his capital around the year 1000, and the ramparts are walkable with the lake on one side and the plain on the other.

On the way down, the icon gallery on the eastern slope. The collection is small, dark and superb: thirty or so panels from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, some painted on both faces for carrying in procession, and among the more important collections of Byzantine icons anywhere.

Then swim, and eat late, because tomorrow you go home.

The town museum occupies a nineteenth century merchant's house on the bazaar street, with an overhanging upper floor, carved ceilings and an archaeological collection below. It takes half an hour and it is the last piece of the picture: the Ohrid that traded, rather than the Ohrid that prayed.

Then a swim and a coffee on the lakefront until the bus.

From here you have options. Skopje is three hours back the way you came and has the nearest big airport; Ohrid's own airport has summer flights to a handful of European cities; and Albania is over the border at the southern end of the lake, with buses to Tirana in four or five hours through the mountains.