Macedonia’s prime tourist destination, Lake Ohrid, combines natural splendour with enchanting testaments to culture. In Byzantine times, it was reputed to host some 365 churches – one for every day of the year – on its wooded shores.

There aren’t that many left today, but Ohrid’s impressive churches are definitely high points of any visit: Sveti Naum, located on the southernmost tip of the lake, is a 9th-century church located on a high bluff, filled with ancient frescoes and populated by monks and peacocks that strut across its lawns. Sveti Kaneo, on the other side of the lake above Ohrid’s Old Town, is also perched high above the water and is a great place for watching the sun set over Albania, far away to the west. Plaosnik, finally, is a recently reconstructed cathedral notable for its strict adherence to Byzantine design.

Summers in Ohrid are lit up by an annual festival held in July featuring world-class music and theatre events held in the ancient Greek amphitheatre, located beneath the medieval castle walls of Bulgar Tsar Simeon. Strolling around the Old Town’s cobbled paths leads to more entertainment and eateries, like the famous Antico, serving Macedonian traditional fare, and a combination of sleek modern cafés and bars like the cool Jazz Inn.

The lake itself is a three million-year-old masterpiece of nature, stretching for over 30 kilometres from north to south. It’s home to an endangered species of trout that lives only in the lake, as well as a curious eel that lurks near the bottom of the lake (at places, over 1,000 feet deep). Legend has it that the eel’s mating ritual takes it to the far-off Sargasso Sea once in 20 years, inscrutably knowing how to navigate rivers and deep currents to make it back to Ohrid and only Ohrid.

Ohrid people tell many legends, of course, another being about the hundred-year-old bottles of French wine left over from a first world war battle between the Allied forces and the Bulgars in what is now Galicica National Park. According to the stories, somewhere in the Galicica mountains that separate Ohrid from its sister tectonic lake, Prespa, is buried the wine left by the French for safekeeping. But nobody who knows the legend knows where. This, I suppose, is the magic of it.

Ohrid has many, many things to be discovered yet. And they aren't all just myth; archaeologists are working now on uncovering the remains of a 3,000-year-old underwater settlement off of the coast near the beach at Gradishte. It was once suspended on stilts above the water; there are plans to reconstruct the settlement faithfully as a museum, and display there the ancient artifacts still to be dug up from the Ohrid deeps.