Travel Guide Kurbinovo

Kurbinovo is most famous for its Church of St. George, with its remarkable 12th-century frescoes. The village also boasts beautiful scenery. It lies 950 m above sea level, between Lake Prespa (2 km to the west) and the Baba massif, which culminates at Mount Pelister at 2,601 m. Below, along the lake, the minaret of a mosque marks the village of Asamati (Асамати, Asamat). The village has around 160 inhabitants, half of them Albanians. The origin of its name is open to debate, but it comes from the Greek word asomatos (ασώματος), which literally means "without body". For some, this evokes the incorporeal nature of the angels painted in the church of St. George in Kurbinovo. But the most widely-held theory is that the village was founded by battered soldiers of the Bulgarian emperor Samuel, after the Byzantine victory at Kleidion in 1014. Most of the 15,000 survivors of the Bulgarian army had their eyes gouged out and their hands cut off. Some of them settled here, near Samuel's capital, on the island of Agios Achillios in the small lake Prespa, now in Greece.