Frozen
at an early morning hour, the stony hands of the giant, cracked
clock commemorate the horror. The earthquake that struck Skopje
in 1963 has shattered not only its Byzantine decor, has demolished
not merely the narrow passageways of its Ottoman past, has transformed
not only its Habsburgian waterfront with its baroque National Theatre.
The disastrous reconstruction, supervised by a Japanese architect,
has robbed it of its soul. It has been rendered a drab and sprawling
socialist metropolis replete with monumentally vainglorious buildings,
now falling into decrepitude and disrepair. The influx of destitute
and simpleton villagers (which more than quintupled Skopje's population)
was crammed by central planners with good intentions and avaricious
nature into low-quality, hi-rise slums in newly constructed "settlements".
Skopje is a city of extremes. Its
winter is harsh in shades of white and grey. Its summer is naked
and steamy and effulgent. It pulses throughout the year in smoke-filled,
foudroyant bars and dingy coffee-houses. Polydipsic youths in migratory
skeins, eager to be noted by their peers, young women on the hunt,
aging man keen to be preyed upon, suburbanites in search of recognition,
gold chained mobsters surrounded by flaxen voluptuousness - the
cast of the watering holes of this potholed eruption of a city.
The trash seems never to be collected
here, the streets are perilously punctured, policemen often substitute
for dysfunctional traffic lights. The Macedonians drive like the
Italians, gesture like the Jews, dream like the Russians, are obstinate
like the Serbs, desirous like the French and hospitable like the
Bedouins. It is a magical concoction, coated in the subversive patience
and the aggressive passivity of the long oppressed. There is the
wisdom of fear itself in the eyes of the 600,000 inhabitants of
this landlocked, mountain-surrounded habitat. Never certain of their
future, still grappling with their identity, an air of "carpe diem"
with the most solemn religiosity of the devout.
The past lives on and flows into the
present seamlessly. People recount the history of every stone, recite
the antecedents of every man. They grieve together, rejoice in common
and envy en masse. A single organism with many heads, it offers
the comforts of assimilation and solidarity and the horrors of violated
privacy and bigotry. The people of this conurbation may have left
the village - but it never let them go. They are the opsimaths of
urbanism. Their rural roots are everywhere: in the the division
of the city into tight-knit, local-patriotic "settlements". In the
traditional marriages and funerals. In the scarcity of divorces
despite the desperate shortage in accommodation. In the asphyxiating
but oddly reassuring familiarity of faces, places, behaviour and
beliefs, superstitions, dreams and nightmares. Life in a distended
tempo of birth and death and in between.
Skopje has it all - wide avenues with
roaring traffic, the incommodious alleys of the Old Town, the proper
castle ruins (the Kale). It has a Turkish Bridge, recently renovated
out of its quaintness. It has a square with Art Nouveau building
in sepia hues. An incongruent digital clock atop a regal edifice
displayed the minutes to the millennium - and beyond. It has been
violated by American commerce in the form of three McDonald restaurants
which the locals proceeded cheerfully to transform into snug affairs.
Stolid Greek supermarkets do not seem to disrupt the inveterate
tranquility of neighbourhood small grocers and their coruscant congeries
of variegated fruits and vegetables, spilling to the pavement.
In winter, the light in Skopje is
diaphanous and lambent. In summer, tis strong and all-pervasive.
Like some coquettish woman, the city changes mantles of orange autumn
leaves and the green foliage of summer. Its pure white heart of
snow often is hardened into grey and traitorous sleet. It is a fickle
mistress, now pouring rain, now drizzle, now simmering sun. The
snowy mountain caps watch patiently her vicissitudes. Her inhabitants
drive out to ski on slopes, to bathe in lakes, to climb to sacred
sites. It gives them nothing but congestion and foul atmosphere
and yet they love her dearly. The Macedonian is the peripatetic
patriot - forever shuttling between his residence abroad and his
true and only home. Between him and his land is an incestuous relationship,
a love affair unbroken, a covenant handed down the generations.
Landscapes of infancy imprinted that provoke an almost Pavolvian
reaction of return.
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."
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