Legend has it that it was born of a fairy’s tears. Shared between Montenegro and Albania, Lake Skadar is the largest lake in the Balkans: 530 km² of water at the foot of limestone mountains where the rain, more than two metres a year, rushes underground before resurfacing at the bottom of the lake. Swollen by the spring floods, it can lose a third of its surface area in summer. Among monasteries, abandoned villages and bunkers, its shores shelter a life of rare richness, and those who watch over it know what that life depends on: underground waters that are only beginning to be understood, and what people will decide to do with the lake.
“If you don’t pay attention to them, lakes seem peaceful and unchanging.” Skadar, for its part, lives to the rhythm of the spring floods and the summer drought.
Its level rises, falls, then rises again: for Danilo Mrdak, Skadar “really breathes”.Here, it is the water that decides the way. It eats away at the limestone and gypsum, carving canyons, underground rivers and countless caves; Skadar is thought to have come from one of these basins born of a collapse, a polje. The geologist Milan Radulović goes down to the bottom of a sinkhole, where a stream disappears, and pours in fluorescein, a dye that should reveal where this water comes out. Only a tiny part of the network has been explored, and generations of geologists have followed one another there. It takes twenty-four to forty-eight hours for the dye to reappear. It is watched for on the western shore, where the lake, six metres deep on average, opens onto vertical cavities that geologists call “okas”, “eye” in Montenegrin. At the bottom of almost every one a spring gushes up; together, they supply the lake with nearly 30% of its water. It is below the village of Radus, in the deepest, sixty metres, that the green finally rises. The map of the network can be completed, and the stakes go beyond science: up in the hills, villages lack drinking water in summer, while Skadar ranks among the largest reservoirs of underground fresh water in the world.
A coloured marker that makes it possible to “follow the thread of the water” through the rock, fluorescein will help Milan Radulović complete the hydrogeological map of Skadar.
The lake, naturally green, muddies the trail: at every false alarm, Milan Radulović takes a sample, tested under an ultraviolet lamp and then in the laboratory.
Hundreds of kilometres of passages, probably all connected to one another; exactly how is “the whole question”.In spring, the water floods the banks and turns the lake into a vast wetland, a stopover on the Adriatic flyway. Among ornithologists, says Darko Saveljić, it is known as “the European airport for birds”: millions of birds fly over it every year. Its emblem, the Dalmatian pelican, is suffering from the climate. Its nesting has moved forward to December, the time of heavy rains: the water rises fast and drowns the eggs and chicks. Rafts and floating platforms have allowed the colony to recover, and the whole population now nests on them: 278 birds counted, when the lake did not have a single one in the 1990s. In the waterweed beds along the shore, the biologist Bogić Gligorović, who as a child was already raising dragonfly larvae, records 52 species of this insect, which is 340 million years old. On the other side of the lake, the Orthodox monk Filip, who came fifteen years ago to help rebuild a monastery that had lain in ruins for several centuries, ended up staying. His bees forage on lotus, water lily, sage and wild mint. Him, living in a flat? “I think I would go mad.”
A national park of 80,000 hectares, created in 1983, protects the birds across the whole Montenegrin part of the lake.
Before taking to the air, the dragonfly has lived two to three years underwater: a carnivorous larva, and even a cannibalistic one when space runs short.
Not very sweet, with a surprising aroma, the monk Filip’s honey is sometimes eaten with its wax, for its medicinal properties.Montenegro has more than 3,500 plant species. On the rocks overlooking the lake, the botanist Snežana Dragićević points out Cymbalaria microcalyx, a plant found only here that dates from the Tertiary. At the end of that period, plants fleeing glaciation migrated from the Alps to find refuge here. She is worried about the pollution that enriches the water and speeds up the spread of scrub. The process is natural, “it is even said that every lake’s dream is to become a meadow”, but people are hastening it, at the risk of seeing Skadar disappear. The Montenegrin Constitution may well make the country a “democratic, social and ecological state”, yet hotel complexes and dams loom as a threat. Fifteen rangers and two boats patrol several hundred square kilometres, under the leadership of Dražen Ivanović. At the end of summer, after weeks close to 40 °C, the lake has lost a third of its surface area. The ichthyologist Danilo Mrdak calls it a “bioreactor”: thanks to the springs, it completely renews its water three times a year. He dreads the dams on the Morača and the large tourist sites already planned: “I fear Lake Skadar will not be able to bear it.”
Relative to its area, Montenegro is the richest country in Europe in plant species, thanks to a climate that is both warm and humid.
Above the lake, the terrain and the humidity create a true microclimate, very favourable to certain species.
To counter eutrophication, Snežana Dragićević calls for water treatment measures and closer attention to the activities that pollute the lake.
A ranger for seven years, Dražen Ivanović tracks down poaching and illegal building; his favourite moment on the lake is still dawn.On the Albanian side, the lake changes its name: it becomes the Shkodra. For fifty years, it separated two enemy communist regimes. Enver Hoxha had the trees on its shores cut down and bunkers built: the programme planned for a million, one per inhabitant, and 700,000 rose from the ground. The biologist Philippe Théou, a bat specialist, visits them one by one. While caves are enough for bats on the Montenegrin side, here only the bunkers give them the coolness and darkness they seek, and the lake gives them their food: a small colony consumes several tonnes of insects. One evening, a net stretched across an entrance catches a Kuhl’s pipistrelle, a male in the middle of the mating season. Philippe Théou hopes the two countries will one day manage their protected areas together, since bats and pelicans know no borders. In Shkodra, a city founded 2,400 years ago, Luçjan Bedeni watches over the more than 500,000 photographs of the studio opened in 1849 by the Italian exile Pietro Marubi. Put online, these photos have shown the inhabitants the faces of their ancestors, and the life they led around the lake.
A bunker becomes a refuge only if its concrete offers crevices to cling to; bats, owls and swallows then move in.
It is by a small canine, set close against the large one, that Philippe Théou recognises Kuhl’s pipistrelle; the capture also reveals how the roost is used, for breeding or hibernation.
At the confluence of the lake, the Drin and the Buna, Shkodra lived under Venice and then the Ottomans, and prospered thanks to silk and copper.“There is life being born from those bunkers.”Philippe Théou