Then, on the morning I flew out, I had a phone call from a literary friend, just back from Italy: ‘Tom, Albanians are the new Mafia in Europe, only they’re more ruthless. They control organised crime, the drug rackets, prostitution, arms deals and money laundering. Albanians are everywhere.’

When I arrived at Skopje airport on 23 August, military helicopters and planes occupied most of the airport’s runways. The drive from Skopje to Struga on Lake Ohrid normally takes two hours. This time we had to take a more circuitous route, past numerous military roadblocks.

The local atmosphere seemed ebullient. I went straight to the opening ceremony in the large auditorium of the ‘House of Poetry’. Next door is a park with trees planted by every winner of the Struga ‘Gold Wreath’ Award.

This was the fortieth year of the festival. I was the recipient in 1989, and my tree was thriving. It threw a good shade. This year’s winner was Seamus Heaney.

The opening event, called ‘Meridians’, consisted of fifteen poets reading a poem in their own language (English, Dutch, Belgian, Russian, Italian, Hebrew, Turkish, Portuguese etc.) followed by a translation into Macedonian. It was an endurance test, especially as the readers were on stage all night in full view of the 15,000-strong audience. But it was fascinating to hear the cadences of several languages. Heaney was the final reader. He then received his Gold Wreath with a crooked grin and an informal thank-you speech in which he praised the fact that the Wreath was indeed gold.

Having been through the detailed schedule imposed on the recipient, I knew Heaney would be faced, over the next couple of days, with a long series of formal meetings with local dignitaries, press and television interviews, public addresses and the usual question-and-answer seminar when the winner is expected to be au fait with local politics and poetic theories. As Heaney remarked during one of these sessions: ‘At the end of the year you do not ask yourself how many successful press interviews you have done; you ask, have I written one or two good poems?’

In 1989, it was the question of independence from Yugoslavia and the ‘authenticity of the Macedonian language’ that recurred. Those problems have been peacefully and triumphantly overcome, but this year the issue of Albanian terrorism was uppermost in everybody’s mind.

At the mayoral reception, the international visitors were thanked for attending. Half the advertised number had opted out at the last minute, including Ferenc Juhász from Hungary, Andre Voznesenskiy from the Russian Federation and Edoardo Sanguineti from Italy (Gold Wreath laureate). Heaney pointed out that, in his country, people were used to terrorism, they simply went on with their lives. He was pleased, though, that the presence of international poets was seen as an affirmation of support for Macedonia during its present problems.

In talks over the coming days, it became clear that Macedonians were fearful and apprehensive. They had exercised humanitarian support for the Kosovo Albanians, had given them shelter and financial support – now, in return, they were being terrorised by the ‘new Mafia’. Many of the old complaints about Albanians that I had heard in Pristina in 1986 resurfaced: ‘They are brigands; they live tribally’; ‘They give women no rights, they treat them as chattels, machines to manufacture children with twelve, fifteen, twenty-two in each family’; ‘Macedonian Albanians have their own farms, their educational standards are rising, but the Kosovo Albanians don’t want to change, they want to remain peasants.’ People pointed out that NATO had thrown US$20 million into Albanian universities but that most of the money ‘has been diverted to supplying arms for the terrorists’. NATO has been dubbed ‘New Albanian Terrorist Organisation’. Military staff ‘on the ground’ at Kosovo were reported as saying, ‘We backed the wrong side’, which probably means that NATO gave far too much credence to the so-called Albanian National Liberation Army (which supports a vaster theoretical Greater Albania than exists on any map, except that proposed by an influential Albanian academic).

Nearly all the international poets expressed strong support for the Macedonian identity and culture now under threat. As a local academic said to me: ‘The oldest European university was in Ohrid, not Bologna. We have a tradition of culture and education.’ The remarkable enthusiasm for poetry at this long-standing festival rather confirmed this.

There were several small, but notable, changes in the schedule of events. The Sunday wine-celebration picnic (with a prize for the best wine poem) was no longer at the idyllic Monastery of St Naum on the Albanian border, but in Ohrid. There were no excursions beyond the Ohrid–Struga area. A revered Macedonian monastery, some 600 years old, had been destroyed by Albanian terrorists just two days before my arrival, retaliation for the Prilip mosque. An underswell of anger was obvious at such barbarity, but it was being suppressed. It was as if there was a general fear as to what might happen if revenge got out of hand.

At the Struga festival, the final event is a ‘Portrait of the Gold Wreath Winner’, which is broadcast live on national television. Previously, it had always been held in the venerable Church of St Sophia in Ohrid, an evocative Macedonian monument, originally a church, then a mosque (with the great fourteenth-century frescoes painted over), then restored at the end of the Ottoman occupation to a shadow of its original splendour. This year, the event was held in the night air, outside the contemporary Monastery of Our Lady of Kalishta on the lakeside.

Seamus Heaney gave his last speech, in which he stressed the peaceful offering of poetry, even when its subject is war. A group of four actors, male and female, read a dozen or so of his poems, emotionally, in Macedonian, drawn from the immensely handsome and heavy bilingual presentation volume of Heaney’s works (the author’s own selection). The translations were by the eminent Macedonian poet Bogomil Gjuzel (about to be published in New York in an edition with a Preface by Charles Simic). Heaney’s final speech was translated by Zoran Ancevski, who once lived in Melbourne and worked with Chris Wallace-Crabbe on an anthology of Macedonian prose which, alas, was never finished.

Seamus Heaney concluded his address with words that carried particular reverberations in that place at that time:

Orpheus holding his lyre like a shield against the dark, leading his beloved up the dark slope towards the light: these are the images of poetry and of the poet’s work that I want to call to mind at this moment in Struga. Macedonia has suffered unfairly, the fates have dealt the nation a hard blow, but, from what I know of the Macedonian spirit, I know there is a Macedonian ability to keep facing the light.

The Struga Poetry Evenings 2001 were over. On my way to Skopje airport, someone pointed out the village of Tetovo in the nearby hills overlooking the Skopje plain. In June, Albanian terrorists had threatened Tetovo. From its position, it commanded strategic firing lines on the airport, the main highway between Belgrade and Athens, and the city itself. It was the last time the Macedonian army retaliated with gunfire. NATO peacekeepers have since stepped in. Macedonian arms purchases are now strictly monitored. The Albanian arms smugglers cannot be supervised. Yes, the Macedonians are angry, but, as the Irish Ambassador accompanying Heaney said to me: ‘They seem more fearful than vengeful, as if their generosity and humaneness had been betrayed.’

The very afternoon I left, another bomb blast near Tetovo killed two more Macedonians. That was the closest I got to the war zone. The poetry and the encounters with fellow poets were refreshing (though a note for English speakers: French is still the lingua franca). One can learn much from rubbing shoulders with writers from different countries, even if we did tend to complain about the same problems: shrinking print runs, marginalisation, economic factors. But we also felt part of a united band, and glad we had gone.