The basilica on the island

In 985 the Bulgarian tsar Samuel took Larissa and carried off the relics of its bishop, Saint Achilleios. The following year he built a church for them on a small island in Small Prespa and made Prespa the capital of his kingdom.

The Basilica of Agios Achilleios is a three-aisled timber-roofed church, and enough of it stands to give a real sense of its scale. For five centuries it was the cathedral of Prespa.

Excavations found four burials in the south aisle, which the excavator believed held members of Samuel's family — possibly Samuel himself. A fragment of gold-embroidered silk with eagles woven into it came out of one of the graves and is now in Thessaloniki.

The island also holds a sixteenth-century monastery, and the remains of three more churches from the eleventh, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Beneath all of them lies a Hellenistic town.

Every August the basilica hosts a cultural festival.

The hermitages

The southern shore of Great Prespa is a wall of cliffs, and in that wall, between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, monks cut out small chapels and cells. Several survive with their wall paintings — the Metamorfosi, Panagia Eleousa, the Analipsi — and there are painted images directly on the rock face.

You reach them by boat from the village of Psarades. Another, the hermitage of Agios Athanasios, was only uncovered in 2021 and is a short walk from the village along the shore.

A modern agreement

In June 2018, in the village of Psarades, Greece and North Macedonia signed the agreement that settled the dispute over the latter's name. It is known as the Prespa Agreement, after this place.

Agios Germanos is the largest village, built on a slope with stone houses and wooden balconies. Its church, of the early eleventh century, has Byzantine wall paintings, with a larger basilica added in 1882. There is a restored watermill, a traditional tsipouro still, and the information centre of the society that works to protect the lakes.

Psarades is the only Greek village on Great Prespa, and it sits directly on the water. Its houses are stone and mudbrick in the Macedonian style, and its harbour is where the boats leave for the hermitages. This is where the lake fish is eaten.

Agios Achilleios, on the island, has eleven houses and about twenty-five permanent residents. It is one of only two inhabited lake islands in Greece, and you walk to it across a floating footbridge 650 metres long.

Mikrolimni, Laimos, Platy and Vrontero are the other settlements around the shores. The church at Platy has sixteenth-century frescoes.

Part of Prespa was declared a national forest in 1974, and the protected area has grown since. It is one of the most important wetlands in Europe.

The birds

More than two hundred species have been recorded here.

The reason Prespa is known internationally is the Dalmatian pelican, a globally threatened bird that breeds in the reedbeds of Small Prespa in numbers found almost nowhere else. The great white pelican breeds here too. In summer they fly between the two lakes — nesting on the small one, feeding on the large one — and the narrow strip of land between the lakes is the best place to watch them cross.

Greylag geese hold a permanent population here, unusually for a migratory bird. Herons and cormorants are everywhere.

There is an observation point where members of the ornithological society will lend you a telescope.

The walking

Marked paths run from Psarades to Cape Roti, five kilometres out along the shore with a view into the international part of the lake, and from Agios Germanos up into the mountains. Above the villages rise the slopes of Varnous.

Near the chapel of Agios Georgios, on the road between the lakes, stands a group of ancient junipers.

Prespa is known across Greece for its beans. They are grown on the plain between the lakes and they are the thing people take home.

The other local food is fish from the lakes — carp, and small fish dried in the sun, which are a standard meze in the villages. Freshwater fish has a stronger flavour than sea fish and not everyone takes to it.

Agios Germanos has a working tsipouro distillery, and the villages sell honey, herbs and preserved fruit.