Key Takeaways:
A new memoir from the Prespa lakes region shows how one of Europe's most biodiverse border zones is becoming a case study in climate-driven water loss.
Julian Hoffman's "Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece" (David R. Godine, 328 pages) chronicles two decades of life where Albania, Greece, and North Macedonia share borders, a park, and a shrinking water system. The book opens with birds — sparrows and house martins arriving from North Africa — and builds into a meditation on what happens when a watershed shared by three nations begins to fail.
"The disappearance of the regent honeyeater's song is a cultural issue, too," Hoffman writes, drawing a parallel between species extinction and the loss of human languages. The Australian scientist he interviews at the "Difficult Bird Research Group" — which Hoffman calls "the best title for a scientific team I've yet heard" — works to preserve the honeyeater and its song, a task Hoffman frames as cultural preservation as much as conservation biology.
The memoir documents how Greater Prespa Lake is shrinking as deep snows become rarer, threatening a region that hosts Dalmatian pelicans, European brown bears, wolves, badgers, and otters. The Vlachs and Sarakatsani herding peoples are vanishing from the mountains, taking their dialects with them. "Language is a communal shelter," Hoffman writes, connecting linguistic diversity to biodiversity in a region where both are eroding.
Hoffman's central thesis rests on etymology: "Economy" and "ecology" share the ancient Greek root "oikos," meaning "house." "What economy refers to, then, in its original sense, is the act of looking after one's house," he writes. The argument reframes environmental stewardship as a geopolitical necessity for the three nations sharing the Prespa watershed — not a luxury of wealthy countries but a matter of collective survival.
The Hoffmans arrived in the village of Agios Germanos in 2000, having left London "in need of shelter." Five years of market gardening ended when Hoffman injured his back; he turned to writing while his wife Julia built a career in environmental management. The couple's trajectory mirrors the region's own transition from subsistence agriculture to conservation-driven economies.
The book's most striking passages are its nature writing. An encounter with a European brown bear — "a near relative of the American grizzly" — captures the tension between human presence and wild habitat:
"The bear suddenly padded off the rock to hit the meadow in full flight, thumping towards me. It cut the distance between us in half before sheering away, hurtling down the slope and slipping into a pocket of mountain beeches. The echo of its run beat like a drum inside me, so that all I could do was stand still in my meadow — breathing, breathing, breathing — as skylark song fell about me like rain."
The region's history adds weight to the narrative. Greece's northern border was only established a century ago, and a devastating civil war in the late 1940s depopulated villages across the area. The Prespa lakes region has been a frontier for generations — first of conflict, now of environmental change.
Reviewer David Mason, whose new poetry collection "Cold Fire" is forthcoming, notes that Hoffman's book is not a comedy of relocation in the vein of Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence." Instead, it is a serious examination of what "home" means when the environment that defines it is under threat. "Home can be both a place and a way of getting there," Hoffman writes.
The book's urgency is unmistakable. As the region's water emergency deepens, the three countries sharing the Prespa basin face a choice: cooperate on conservation or watch a shared resource disappear. Hoffman's memoir argues that the lifelines connecting the region's birds, bears, herders, and languages are the same threads that bind the three nations together. Whether they hold will determine not just the fate of the pelicans, but the character of the border itself.
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