Annemarie Lopez talks with Prespa-based author Julian Hoffman about lessons from walking quietly in nature

The faraway home

The walnut cake at Eklekti is, Julian Hoffman assures me, the best in these parts. We’re sitting outside the small café in Psarades, a fishing village nestled on the shores of Great Prespa Lake. Hoffman orders for us in what sounds to my ears like lovely Greek and Kiryaki, the café owner, smiles. Later, she’s on the phone arranging a taxi for a stranded French artist headed to his next performance – the kind of neighbourly service that makes Eklekti more than just a café. But it’s typical of the Prespa region, where people go above and beyond for visitors.

Writer and author of Lifelines – a magical work of nature writing that blends personal reflection with lyrical observation of the living world – Hoffman knows all about it. Twenty-five years ago, he and his wife Julia were caught in London’s relentless work-commute cycle, craving wide-open spaces and a life less ruled by timetables. Arriving as strangers, they were soon embraced by the region, finding not just a home, but a calling.

Their great escape began with a book review in the back of an RSPB magazine. The book Prespa: a story for Man and Nature by Greek conservationist-biologist Giorgos Catsadorakis, was entirely devoted to this remote corner where Greece meets Albania and North Macedonia. The review was so compelling they bought it immediately and pored over pictures of a landscape that captivated them. It is also a landscape in profound transformation, subject to the strange arithmetic of environmental change: loss in one place that becomes abundance in another.

A fragile equation

Great Prespa Lake, one of Europe’s oldest lakes, was vanishing at what Hoffman calls “an astonishing speed.” Jetties that once welcomed fishing boats now stood high and dry, relocated once, then twice, their parched wooden planks stretching toward water that retreated each season. He saw how the shrinking lake traced new shapes around the shoreline, leaving behind bone-white pebble beaches where no water would ever lap again.

But as the lake withdrew, new life began to take its place, says Hoffman. On its southern shores, a forest began to grow, made up of silver birch (the southernmost stands in Europe) alongside native willow, alder and poplar. Within thirty years, what had been lakebed became a wildlife corridor for bears, wolves, badgers, and wildcats.

“If you look at photographs from the 1960s,” Hoffman says, “there’s almost nothing growing on the hills above Psarades. The population was higher then, and people kept many more animals.” The pastoral economy that had shaped these mountains for millennia, sheep and cattle grazing, seasonal migrations between valley and peak, was fading as surely as the lake itself. Depopulation, that quiet catastrophe of rural Europe, left the land to its own devices.

Lessons of the lake

Ecologists call this succession. Hoffman uses the term adaptability. “While the lake is decreasing, the natural world finds ways to respond.” He hesitates to use the word resilience as it is too often co‑opted by those who wish to normalise climate change. But in the forest’s advance he finds a lesson in flexibility, in imagining new ways to live in a changing world.

This is the paradox of the Anthropocene: even as we catalogue losses, nature continues its perpetual work of becoming. The forest now thriving where waters once lapped is not just a symbol of ecological succession but of biological hope, proof that life finds a way, even when the way forward looks nothing like the way back.

For Hoffman, who arrived as a birdwatcher and stayed as a chronicler of change, the forest offers a metaphor worth carrying: “If a lake is leaving, we may need to find ways to become a forest – to change our patterns, to reimagine how we live to fit the new shape of the world.”

Walking and talking with nature

These ideas ripple to the surface while Hoffman is out walking. A daily walk is key to his thinking and writing, he says. Often he retraces the same paths, over and over, looking for subtle changes, a new insect, a wild orchid blooming. In the early years in Prespa, when his Greek was “almost non‑existent,” walking became a kind of literacy. Following mountain tracks, tracing the footfalls of others, he learned to read the signs – plants and animals, but also the human history etched in stone walls, old tracks, and abandoned houses. Walking offered what conversation could not yet provide: a way in, a way to begin to belong.

Now, a quarter‑century on, walking, and the stories that emerge from it, remain central to his work. Stories, he says, are “engines of connection,” linking people to each other, to other species, to different places. And listening is as vital as telling. “An ear can be just as transformative as a voice,” he notes, “because it’s in listening, in that quiet attention, that stories can truly grow into something larger, even into a forest.”

This ethos is also behind events like the Walking Arts Encounters, which bring visitors to Prespa and foster dialogue between locals and visitors, between human and more‑than‑human worlds. It’s a practice of attention that goes beyond mere observation.

In Prespa, stories and forests are braided together, filling spaces left by what has gone, quietly healing a landscape scarred by civil war, economic hardship and environmental damage. The lake may be receding, but in its wake, new narratives of adaptation and connection are taking root. Perhaps this is what hope looks like in the age of climate change: not restoring what was, but cultivating what might come to be.

As with his feel for the natural world, Hoffman’s instincts on the walnut cake are finely tuned. Nature’s work may take decades to unfold, but the delicious cake disappears in minutes.