Ohrid (ancient Lychnidos, medieval Achris) is a city in southwestern Macedonia, located along the Via Egnatia on the northeastern shore of Ohrid lake. It was an archbishopric and later capital of Bulgaria under Samuel of Bulgaria.

Archbishop Theophylaktos of Ohrid (died 1108) wrote that around 900 the city was a center of the building activity of St. Kliment of Ohrid, but no independent source verifies this late evidence. The city is first mentioned in 11- century sources: a Byzantine historian wrote that the palace of the Bulgarian basileis was erected there. Ohrid was probably the capital of the empire of Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria and of the Bulgarian patriarchate. In 1019/20 Basil II occupied it and made it one of four kastra (together with Prespa, Mokros, and Kitzabis) of the autocephalous Bulgarian archbishopric - but the name "metropolis of Achris" emerges only in a late notitia. The 12th-century author Anna Komnene considered the name Ohrid as a barbarous term for the ancient lake of Lychnidos; neither she, however, nor Michael of Devol, in his supplement to Skylitzes, who mention both the lake and the city of Lychnidos, equate Ohrid with the city of Lychnidos, which was a bishopric in the 4th-5th century, replaced in the 6th century by Justiniana Prima. In the 13th century Ohrid was contested between Bulgaria and Epiros; returned to Byzantine control, it was then conveyed to Stefan Uroš IV Dušan by the treaty of Aug. 1334 and fell to the Turks in 1394. The letters of the city's two most prominent archbishops, Theophylaktos and Demetrios Chomatenos, reflect the changing situation of the church in Ohrid: in the 11th century the archbishop tried in vain to secure imperial support against the local officials; in the 13th century his successor defended the privileges of the archbishopric against the patriarchate in Nicaea.