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Skopje - Where Time Stood Still
Skopje - Where Time Stood Still
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
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 become 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, ageing 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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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International
(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health
and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and
Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
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