Samuel’s Fortress Ohrid: Tickets, Hours and What Is Really Old

Samuel’s Fortress is a morning job. The gate is shut every Monday of the year. It closes at 4.30 pm from May to September and at 3.30 pm from October to April, so the ticket is the smallest part of the cost. Come when it opens at nine, while the stone is still cool and the tour groups are somewhere else, and the whole hill is yours for the first hour.

Which ticket for Samuel’s Fortress

Foreign visitors pay €2.43 for the ramparts, a tariff set by the museum and heritage institute that runs the site. It is paid in cash, in denars, at the gate. A card machine there cannot be counted on, so draw money in town before you start the climb.

Residents and students pay less, as the table shows, and the lower rates need an ID. Only the ramparts carry a fee. The slopes and the approach are free, and so is the view from the Upper Gate. A visitor who wants only the outline of the hill against the lake can stand there and pay nothing, which is a fair deal on a day when the gate is shut.

Shut on Mondays all year.

When to come

From 1 May to 30 September the fortress is open from 9 am to 4.30 pm. From 1 October to 30 April it closes an hour earlier, at 3.30 pm. Monday is the closed day in every season, a rule of the institute that also shuts its museums on that day, and nobody at the gate can bend it.

The verdict is to arrive at nine and not after lunch. The summer closing time leaves a short afternoon, and the groups from the day trips fill the path by late morning. On a Monday the walls are out of reach. The ancient theatre just below the gate can still be looked at, and so can the church at Kaneo from the outside, which makes Monday a day for the lake.

The climb and what you see

The way up leaves the old town on cobbles and ends at the Upper Gate, which is also the entrance. Count on 10 to 15 minutes on foot. The hill carries the walls about 100 m above the lake, and the ramparts run for roughly 3 km at heights between 3 and 16 m, so there is far more wall than a first look from the harbour suggests. The fortress takes up the whole of the Ohrid hill, which is why the walls seem to follow you all the way round.

Inside, the pleasure is the walk along the ramparts and the view back over the old town and the water. The order for the day goes uphill and then down. Take the church of St Sophia and the theatre first, the fortress at nine, then Plaošnik, and finally the wooden walkway to Kaneo for a swim or a late lunch.

What is old and what is rebuilt

The label “ancient fortress of Tsar Samuel” is half true. Most of the surviving walls of the citadel and its suburb date from the time of Samuel, who ruled from 976 to 1014, and from his successors until 1018. Basil II then tore the place down. Later rulers rebuilt it, among them the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos, and under all of it lies an older trace from the 4th century BC, probably laid out under Philip II. Livy mentions the place in 209 BC, and systematic research and conservation began only in 2000.

What you walk on today is mostly newer. The walls and ramparts were heavily restored in 2003, and many of the battlements are fresh stone set where nothing had survived. Only the Upper Gate stands complete, with marble gravestones carrying Greek and Roman inscriptions reused in its masonry. Treat the fortress as a reconstruction on an old plan, and it repays the climb.

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When you are short on time

With an hour to spare, keep only what carries the visit. The ramparts and the gate give most of what the hill has to offer, and everything else can wait for another day.

• Start at nine on any day but Monday, when the gate is shut.
• Carry cash in denars, since cards at the gate are unreliable.
• Walk the ramparts first, then look for the gravestones set into the Upper Gate on the way out.
• Finish at the ancient theatre just below the gate, which costs nothing to look at.

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