Skopje - Where Time Stood Still (standard:non fiction, 1298 words)
Author: samvaknin	Added: Oct 10 2004	Views/Reads: 3127/2042	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Skopje is a city of extremes. Its winter is harsh in shades of white and grey. Its summer is naked and steamy and effulgent.

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Skopje has known many molesters. It has been traversed by every major
army in European history and then by some. Occupying a vital crossroad, 
it is a layer cake of cultures and ethnicities. To the Macedonians, the 
future is always portentous, ringing with the ominousness of the past. 
The tension is great and palpable, a pressure cooker close to bursting. 
The river Vardar divides increasingly Albanian neighbourhoods (Butel, 
Cair, Shuto Orizari) from Macedonian (non-Muslim) ones. Albanians have 
also moved from the villages in the periphery encircling Skopje into 
hitherto "Macedonian" neighbourhoods (like Karpos and the Centre). The 
Romas have their own ghetto called "Shutka" (in Shuto Orizari), 
rumoured to be the biggest such community in Europe. The city has been 
also "invaded" (as its Macedonian citizens experience it) by Bosnian 
Muslims. Gradually, as friction mounts, segregation increases. 
Macedonians move out of apartment blocks and neighbourhoods populated 
by Albanians. This inner migration bodes ill for future integration. 
There is no inter-marriage to speak of, educational facilities are 
ethnically-pure and the conflict in Kosovo with its attendant "Great 
Albania" rumblings has only exacerbated a stressed and anxious history. 


It is here, above ground, that the next earthquake awaits, along the
inter-ethnic fault lines. Strained to the point of snapping by a 
KFOR-induced culture shock, by the vituperative animosity between the 
coalition and opposition parties, by European-record unemployment and 
poverty (Albania is the poorest, by official measures) - the scene is 
set for an eruption. Peaceful by long and harsh conditioning, the 
Macedonians withdraw and nurture a siege mentality. The city is 
boisterous, its natives felicitously facetious, its commerce 
flourishing. It is transmogrified by Greek and Bulgarian investors into 
a Balkan business hub. But under this shimmering facade, a great 
furnace of resentment and frustration spews out the venom of 
intolerance. One impolitic move, one unkind remark, one wrong motion - 
and it will boil over to the detriment of one and all. 

Dame Rebecca West was here, in Skopje (Skoplje, as she spells it) about
60 years ago. She wrote: 

"This (Macedonian) woman (in the Orthodox church) had suffered more than
most other human beings, she and her forebears. A competent observer of 
this countryside has said that every single person born in it before 
the Great War (and quite a number who were born after it) has faced the 
prospect of violent death at least once in his or her life. She had 
been born during the calamitous end of Turkish maladministration, with 
its cycles of insurrection and massacre and its social chaos. If her 
own village had not been murdered, she had, certainly, heard of many 
that had and had never had any guarantee that hers would not some day 
share the same fate... and there was always extreme poverty. She had 
had far less of anything, of personal possessions, of security, of care 
in childbirth than any Western woman can imagine. But she had two 
possessions that any Western woman might envy. She had strength, the 
terrible stony strength of Macedonia; she was begotten and born of 
stocks who could mock all bullets save those which went through the 
heart, who could outlive the winters when they were driven into the 
mountains, who could survive malaria and plague, who could reach old 
age on a diet of bread and paprika. And cupped in her destitution as in 
the hollow of a boulder there are the last drops of the Byzantine 
tradition." 

More about this topic here: 

http://ceeandbalkan.tripod.com 

http://samvak.tripod.com/briefs.html 


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