Ohrid Region

The Ohrid Region was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1979 for its natural values and in 1980 was extended with the cultural ones, becoming one of the few mixed properties in the world. In 2019 the property was extended to the Albanian shore of the lake, becoming transboundary between North Macedonia and Albania.

Lake Ohrid is one of the oldest on the planet: it formed in a tectonic trough between two and three million years ago and has maintained its conditions unbroken ever since, without drying out or freezing over completely. That exceptional continuity, shared by only a few lakes such as Baikal or Tanganyika, has allowed an extraordinary evolutionary radiation: it holds more than two hundred endemic species, among them the Ohrid trout, molluscs, freshwater sponges and crustaceans that exist nowhere else. It reaches 288 metres deep.

The cultural component is equally dense: the town of Ohrid was a Slavic centre of the first order from the ninth century, seat of the literary school of Clement and Naum, and preserves an extraordinary group of Byzantine and medieval churches with frescoes and icons, among them St Sophia and St John at Kaneo. Tradition credits it with three hundred and sixty-five churches, one for each day of the year.