US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will visit the Holy Mary Perybleptos church in Ohrid during his visit to Macedonia next week.

Pompeo will attend an event in the Vatican before coming to the Balkans to visit Montenegro, Macedonia and Greece. It’s expected that his talks in Macedonia and Greece will focus on the Prespa treaty.

USAID had funded several projects in Ohrid to maintain important historic and cultural sites, and visiting US officials would often tour the sites, even as the history and the culture of the region are bitterly contested and Macedonia is pressured to declare that a number of monuments and sites belong to the Greek culture or that historic figures were Bulgarian.\

The Holy Mary Perybleptos, or the church of St. Clement was built in the late 13c. by a Byzantian general and became the seat of the Archbishopric of Ohrid. It is the final resting place of St. Clement, his mortal remains transported there after the Ottoman conquerors turned the church of St. Panteleimon into a mosque.