Skopje
is a boiling pot, its citizens often say as the they gasp
the air of the hot summer heat, unaware in fact, how right,
metaphorically, they really are.
And Skopje is truly a boiling pot. First and foremost,
geographically. Skopje is a caldron situated in the shadows
of the mountain range of Vodno, Matka, Kitka and Crna
Gora, where everything moves in an unusual whirl: the
air that descends from the adjoining heights and circulates
the caldron valley, becoming hot and rising, only to return
and somersault once again on the neighboring hills.
From an urban landscape point of view, also, for
this is a city of disheveled buildings stretched out along
its trajectory.
Historically, this is a region of perpetual simmering
- from the early times of prehistory, through the distant
reigns of Dardania, Rome, Byzantium, to 518 AD when its
worthy urban ancestor Skupi was vaporized by the whirl
of tremors caused by a catastrophic earthquake; later
too, when the imperial community of Justiniana Prima was
laid out on its lap; in medieval times, when Tzar
Dushan made it its imperial seat; in the historical backdrop
of the Balkan Quatrocento, when instead of the dawns of
western renaissance, humanism and rationalism dusk set
in, bringing the scent and music of the desert winds and
the impending doom of the half-crescent moon that rode
on the sabers, the passions and the belligerent cries
of the Turkish conquerors.
This was the definitive prelude to the all out Balkan
fate of cultural dualism that Skopje has boiled in ever
since; in the 18th century, when the Austrian General
Picollomini “liberated” the impressive city
in which equally impressive church bells were replaced
by minaret spears that pierced the skies of Skopje. He
burned the city literally making the Skopje caldron a
“hostage” all over again. Skopje continued
to simmer and once again it boiled over when the peasant
leader of the Macedonian rebels Karpoš was put to
cruel punishment and impaled before the eyes of the city
that has a long memory and disturbing recollections. Later,
toward the middle of this spend and tired century, during
the times filled with new passions and йlan, it became
the capital of the new Macedonian state. It has remained
so up to this present day, when it is witness to celebrations
and protests that make our blood boil, just as our
ancestors, following not the quiet rhythm of the our hearts,
but once again the disquieting beat of history.
Furthermore, Skopje is a caldron because the people
of the city are placed in a middle of a never-ending,
combustible commotion; ultimately, this is also due to
the earth itself, that is known to rattle and shake
on occasion. Skopje is a place created for whirls.
Condemned to disquietude. And, to change.
This is why, it is above all, a place laden with
- memories.
THE
REIGN OF NOSTALGICS
If
one were to think about it, one would inevitably come
up with the romantics, the dreamers, the yearners, the
people that belong the Skopje nostalgia community as its
"most Skopje" category. “Nothing unusual about
that”, the skeptic would say, for nostalgia is the
unavoidable decor of cities, the ideology of local-patriots
and traditionalist, even an essential pose of old city
cafe dwellers and voyeurs, who always and each time over,
know to administer it in the right, delicate and animated
doze... And one would be wrong! Because the nostalgia
of Skopje dreamers is particular. It is of
a purely spiritual and personal nature. It is completely
immaterial in composition, because the urban substance
(that would serve to support it) has simply vanished.
When the Stockholm, Prague or Belgrade nostalgic
reminisces, the buildings and edifices of the city serve
as a concrete motive and material inspiration. Their silhouettes
magnify, and at the same time merge with the real contours
of the city, casting upon the onlooker the nostalgic shadow
of the Secessionist period. A Parisian is further
supported by a profusion of literature. For the contemporary
Roman citizen, the edifices and the legend of the Eternal
City are still beheld by the eye, while the Athenian has
practically the foundations of the western spirit and
history at plain sight, supported by the Doric colonnades
of the still erect Acropolis and the unreceding strength
of the myth...
Unlike them, “the Old Skopjan” draws
material for nostalgic yearning from personal and collective
-- memories. The Old Skopjan digs through memories.
He does not live in an eternal, nor even a long-standing
city. For the past three decades, he has been living
in, what is for the most part, a vanished, or a lost city.
Unlike other citizens of the world, a Skopjan fantasizes
about his city. It is not out there for him to touch.
35 years ago, on 26 June, the scourge of an earthquake
pulverized the extensive continuity of Skopje as a city.
On that day, the history of an altogether different city
began. A city of disparate urban(istic) discontinuity.
When five years ago I wrote the screenplay for a multimedia
piece dedicated to Skopje entitled Memento
for a City, I couldn’t get out my head one sentence
from a short story called The Wooden Bridge of Childhood
by Dimitar Solev: “It doesn’t even cross the
mind that you will live in the same, yet altogether different
city”. This is the basis, the ontological truth
of Skopje. As I saw in the moisture eyes of the people
after performing our Skopje Memento…, approaching
us to share their re-veiled melancholic nostalgia and
sorrows, awakened for the audience of over 1,000 viewers,
once again in a reminiscent summer, 30 years after...
The stage director Dimitrie Osmanli multiplied it through
the scenic performances of the artists and the video beam
for which he had re-edited passages from his numerous
films (feature films, documentaries, TV films, reportages)
dedicated to Skopje, and this was embraced by a whole
team of diverse Skopje nostalgics: legends such as the
vocal veteran Ljupka Apostolova singing the melodies of
our jazz pioneer Dragan Gjakonovski-[pato and the actress
Milica Stojanova, the second generation jazz lovers Ljubomir
Brandzolica and Aleksandar Dzambazov, two rock generations
- the first of the legendary bands “Magnifico”
(Mexican music in the stile of the Fifties) and “Bis-Bez”
(first domestic rock’n’rollers of the Sixties),
together with the representatives of the new actors’
generation -- all of them re-shaping the vanished city
spirit and people, each of them in his own way.
The Skopje way. All of them with their own memories
of that city. Skopje that disappeared
in 1963.
The rehearsals of this piece dedicated to the traumatic
memories of the lost city supported by the documentary
material were relentless confrontations with an extinct,
former reality that used to be and yet still is, on video
beams and projection screens. All this created a parallel
“Memento” of Skopje, embodying the new way
the material was experienced and numerous individual discussions.
Just as the citizens of that other Skopje, a different,
half-city came to life. This discrepancy between the two
cities laid out over the same space was strongly felt
even by the youngest of the team. This is the most
important trend that we are undergoing today: a recognition,
a dramatic and elementary urban anagnoresis between the
young citizens and the true City. A remembrance
of an unknown space, a memento of a city that has not
been experienced and is yet one’s own!
This rich and individual energy emanated by the
lost city, has after all, visited us before, in the most
diverse forms: reminiscences, lyric tremors and quivering
mementos...
A
CITY BUILT IN IMAGINATION
Skopje
after 1963 has the quality of being recreated in the most
diverse ways, depending on how it was experienced.
Befitting the particularity and force of the nostalgic
yearning.
In his book The Taste of Peaches Vlada Urosevic
experiences the city as a wondrous, light and prosaic
painting, created by mellow rays of light, the euphoria
of bemused youth, the play of sun light, the transparent
images of vibrating summer air and the odd aftertaste
of dramatic surprise caused by the earthquake. In his
Stories of Skopje, Skopje is a surrealistic city -- before,
during and immediately after the earthquake. In
the same way that it retains a realistic and intimate
structure in the modernistic narration of Dimitar Solev.
Yet, it is also a place of peculiarity, human destines,
miracles and secrets, as in Slavko Janevski and his extensive,
early and perhaps most deeply experienced cycle of prose
dedicated to Skopje, for Gogo Ivanovski and his melancholic
A Street That Meant Life, for Ivan Tochko and his intristic
lyric and modernist prose collection The Premiere ...
This city is the cause for post-earthquake moral
and psychological confrontations in the The Paradox of
Diogenes, and traumatic catharses and lyric reminiscences
of the House of Four Winds by Tome Arsovski.
Skopje is the shattered dream of Mateja Matevski’s
poetry, the place of accumulated layers of historical
recollection in the poetry of Bla`e Koneski, yet
also an unusual and singular center of society in the
prose adventures in his Diary of Years Long Gone.
This is a city with a unrelenting force to acquire Skopjans,
as in the book of poems with the same name by Gane Todorovski,
a metaphysical monument to the strata of centuries in
the poetry of Mihail Rend`ov.
In his drama of nostalgia Long Play Goran Stefanovski
sees the city being torn between the prospects it offers
as a scanty society that is just beginning to open up,
and the wishes and the fantasies of the young generation
of the era of the Beetles, The Rolling Stones, Hendrix,
Dillan and Tom Jones. Recently, in one of those
“personal views on Skopje” Goran’s uncle,
the veteran of theater Riste Stefanovski, let out his
tears of pain in the lost river of his youth: “Even
to this day, the river Vardar draws me - he writes - Sometimes,
to this very day, I plunge in to feel the coolness of
the water...” Yet, one does not plunge in the same
river twice. This is a different river that is but a reminder
of the one that is no longer there. As Heraclitus'
fate of time. And Heraclitus' essence of this City.
Skopje is the keeper of stirring adventures depicted
in the refined prose of the lonely rambler of its
past, writer and chronicle Danilo Kocevski. Beloved
home and the setting for the modernistic, individual plots
in the prose of Blagoja Ivanov, a singular setting for
all kinds of post modern erotic recollections in the prose
of Aleksandar Prokopiev; for unlived memories, a Skopje
that the young ethno-rock writer Sasho Gigov-Gish yearns
for; and the place setting of living, painful, social
dramas and metaphorical associations by emigrants from
the abandoned Aegean as in the work of the writers from
Aegean Macedonia, such as Tashko Georgievski’s We
Beyond The Damn, or Ivan Chapovski’s The Wooden
Bridges of Skopje...
Not to mention the pastel depiction of the melancholic
Skopje of yesteryear, as created by the brushwork of the
veterans of Macedonian art - Pandilov and Belogaski; the
hues of the environment, the temperament of the people
and landscapes on the left side of the river Vardar that
are born from the expressionist pallets of Nikola Martinoski
and Tomo Vladimirski; the post-earthquake painters of
the landscapes of the old Skopje as is the case of the
canvases of Branko Kostovski and Mitrev, that continued
to depict the lost city even after it vanished, resorting
to motives from old photographs and memory.
In short, the one and only Skopje that vanished
is the core recreated in various works; thus, Skopje becomes
the setting that assumes authentically human, at times
historical, at others extra-temporal, sometimes local,
frequently cosmopolitan, on occasion sentimental, even
national characteristics and meaning.
Skopje is a myth, it transcends time, it is an imaginary
creation that resembles the one imagining it.
Finally, it is the setting of dreams. Of my
dreams too, that appear invariably, as an unusual, alterable,
amalgamated collective prose recollection as in my collection
of short stories The Butterfly of Childhood, even
in the screenplay of the film The Mirages of Skopje, or
a transcendental setting for the sentiments in which sparks
from the past ignite, as was the case this summer in my
theater piece Light-bugs in the Night in which my city
vanished.
THE CITIZEN CALLED (THE OLD) SKOPJAN
On
the day of the earthquake, Skopje experienced two catastrophes:
one brought cataclysmic agony by taking 1070 human lives
and many of its characteristic buildings, edifices and
entities; the other, with the effect of a social bomb
with delayed ignition, embodied in the first post-earthquake
immigration influx, that brought two new “provincial
towns” in the one and authentic one that numbered
around 250,000 people.
The first catastrophe forfeited entire urban institutions
of Skopje: the Officers Hall, National Theater, National
Bank, Natural Science Museum, the two post office buildings,
the Macura and Krango palaces, the Passageway, the pompous
modernistic buildings like the administrative facility
across the Assembly building, the Government building,
the Rectorate, the Railway station, the Freedom square,
many private houses in the center and in surrounding neighborhood,
new high-rises, whole districts... and it forfeited the
material urban foundations of the traditional city.
On the other hand, the immigration wave swept away
the authentic spirit of Skopje. Having come from various
parts, the new inhabitants of Skopje brought with
them the specific characteristic of their place of origin
-- mainly the folklore spirit and rural mentality.
En masse. Slowly but surely, the city lost its identity.
The old boiling pot melted with the new, twice as strong
social and spiritual essence. Skopje became a multi-
folklore mosaic made up of its new inhabitants that were
citizens of Skopje in name only,
remaining prisoners of their homelands where they left
their modest possessions, memories, their loved ones,
and their hearts.
Yet, even with such high costs, Skopje was
never inhospitable. This city has always been among the
most open: actor Todor Nikolovski, an accepted honorary
citizen of Skopje and a contemporary of this century that
is coming to a close, recounted to me very vividly a whole
range of acclaimed names and personalities that came to
Skopje in the period between the two World Wars and later;
some of them left, yet most of them fell in love with
the city and stayed. Skopje was one of the most
characteristic cities on the Balkans. A city of
communication and junctions. Its historical openness
made Skopje a urban, cultural and ethnic alloy of all
expected and unexpected, exotic conglomerations: Macedonians,
Turks, Serbs, Vlachs, Romas, Jews, Armenians, Russians,
Ukrainians, and Albanians... being its smelting and well
blended components. At that time, one came to Skopje
in need, out of need, but out of want too. On an even
keel. Gradually…
Following the Earthquake Skopje became the smelt
of a new, impoverished social alloy; now of less, yet
more numerous components. The Jews were deported
during the Second World War, leaving the toponym of the
Jewish Neighborhood as a ominous monument of their extinction
from the multi-ethnic map of the city. Toward the middle
of the fifties, many indigenous Turkish families were
pressurized into moving to Istanbul, and many Muslim families
from Sandzak came to Skopje for the same purpose. They
arrived to Skopje in order to move on, yet they remained
as new migrants. In the second way of migration,
many repatriated Macedonian families from Aegean Macedonia
came to Skopje from the countries of Eastern Europe.
Slowly, yet surely, the Armenians, Russians, even Vlachs
from Skopje melted away. An unceasing flow of thousands
of members of the Albanian nationality from Kosovo came
to Skopje. The boil of migrations created an altogether
new picture of the city: Skopje ranks number one in terms
of the number of Macedonians who live there, but also
of Albanians and Romas. The city of international solidarity
became an Open City. A kind of post-earthquake rupture,
like post war Rome in Rosselini’s surrealist film.
The former (city of international solidarity), by
choosing of the cosmopolitan support for the distraught
Macedonian and (third in size) Yugoslav center; the latter
(City Open to Migrations), they say, by the will of the
formerly very influential politician Edvard Kardelj from
Slovenia. A situation much contrary to that of Ljubljana,
the capital of Slovenia, where the closed concept
of a Central European city with authentic values and merits
still prevails.
Let us make things clear, this concept would not
have succeeded in Skopje. Skopje is a dynamic structure
that would be eaten up by entropy were it to remain closed.
In the same way that the city following the earthquake
was swallowed up by urban pathology and traumatic social
phenomenology. The previous seemed as the “natural
state” of Skopje. In the period of its most illustrious
growth between the two Wars, and later in the period of
growth following the earthquake, Skopje always behaved
like a sponge: it absorbed as many new inhabitants as
it could. At one time, it was evidently the city
that did the choosing. After the earthquake, it
lost this faculty. For the most part, it was the
immigrants, its numerous new inhabitants, that left their
native villages and chose it in great number.
As a settlement to be (re)build. As a place for
a new life. Above all, as a place for that understandable
human strive of seeking a better life.
The problem is that in choosing the city they did
not choose the way of life of the city. Just the opposite.
They brought to the city their rural views, demeanor,
values and habits. Thus, the city was inhabited
by the village. A civic dwelling inhabited
by the proletariat. The Center by the Provincial.
The authentic “third” and later “quarter”
of the traditional (and true) Skopje withdrew within itself,
and later in the memories of decaying characteristics,
buildings, merits and distinctions; it began nurturing
and suffering from the various forms of the affliction
of the myth of the “Old Skopjans”.
I personally like this myth. I contribute
to it. I believe that Skopje must find its own authentic
loyalties and renew its traditions. I even believe
that this renewal should include the rebuilding of some
of its lost capital structures. Although I
was born in another city, I grew up in Skopje. Although
this is now a different City, albeit all, I am deeply
convinced that the problem of the urban identity of Skopje
can be resolved by all of its inhabitants together. Under
one condition: that we all see Skopje as our city, while
our places of birth remain merely our place of origin;
for the purpose of accepting its traditions, characteristic,
authentic spirit, in order to adopt its identity.
In short, in order to feel, to experience and to
create Skopje as our city.
This kind of attitude that can holster hypocrisy.
Unless we start belonging more and more to the city, every
individual act and conduct will be but futile and unfortunate
scraps of villages left behind; nor will the village
take root in the urban space, nor will it live in that
urban center.
A
CALDRON ALL OVER AGAIN
The
high price paid is already visible on every step.
This is a disproportionate, non- individualized city that
still functions according to the collective principles
of social, status, professional, political and ethnic
forms of socialization founded on the mentality or logic
of “village meetings”. Of the rural and collective
spirit. While the city, contrary to the village, is a
complex and harmonized complex of individuals.
At least in the European sense of the word.
Much unlike this, Skopje remains and is once again
a boiling pot on the Balkans. Full of vivacity,
different people, a duality of cultures, national palettes,
but also of national imbalance, of movements crosswise
and lengthwise, dynamic and open, full of problems and
contradictions, at times on the rim of bursting open,
at others wonderful and diverse. At times uncertain to
the verge of exploding, while at others still transparent
and full of ordinary, noble, human dreams.
Skopje is a nostalgic perplexity, diachronic fiction,
an authors’ inspiration , a flowing idea, a city
of missing presence that simmers with us in the real caldron
of the times.
