The Boiling Pot Called Skopje

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The Boiling Pot Called Skopje

The reign of nostalgics
A city built in imagination
The citizen called (the old) Skopjan
A caldron all over again

#2 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…
#3 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…
#4 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-Shpato and the actress Milica Stojanova, the second generation jazz lovers Ljubomir Brandzolica and Aleksandar Dzhambazov, 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…

2018-08-21T17:23:29+00:00 August 1st, 2003|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 33|0 Comments