Three days in Ohrid: where Cyrillic was first taught, on a lake you can swim in

Start at Saint Sofia, which is the most important building in the town and looks from outside like a barn with a Renaissance porch stuck on the front. The church was built in the middle of the eleventh century as the cathedral of the archbishopric, the gallery and towers were added in 1317, and it spent the Ottoman centuries as a mosque, which is why its eleventh century frescoes were plastered over and therefore survived. They were uncovered in the twentieth century and they are extraordinary: a whole wall of bishops, an ascension, and faces that look at you rather than past you.

Climb from there into the lanes and you arrive at the theatre. It was 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, the upper ones do not, and it is used again for concerts in summer. The Romans used it for gladiatorial games, which the local population disliked so much that they buried it after the empire fell, or so the story goes.

Spend the end of the afternoon walking down the far side of the hill to Kaneo. The church is small, thirteenth or fourteenth century, built of stone and brick with a zigzag pattern under the roof, and it stands on a rock directly above the water with nothing else around it. It is the picture of Ohrid on every poster, and it earns it. Below the church there is a ladder into the lake and a small beach, so bring a towel.

Walk back along the boardwalk under the cliff, which is lit at night, and eat by the harbour.

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

Naum was one of Clement's fellow scholars and founded this 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 church itself is small, dark and covered in nineteenth century painting over much older work, with peacocks strutting around outside like they own the grounds, which they do.

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

Come back by road in the late afternoon and stop halfway. In a small bay, a Bronze Age pile village has been rebuilt on the water on the original piles: thatched huts on a platform on stilts, with a museum and a reconstructed Roman fort on the shore behind. It is unashamedly a reconstruction, and it is also the clearest picture anybody has assembled of how people lived on this lake three thousand years ago.

The last morning is one small hill and three things on it.

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

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. Ten minutes and a small ticket.

Then, on the way down, the icon gallery beside the church of 1295 on the eastern slope. The collection is small, dark and superb: thirty or so panels from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, several of them double-sided processional icons, and among the more important collections of Byzantine icons anywhere.

Coffee on the lakefront, and then the bus.