The Boiling Pot Called Skopje

/, Literature, Blesok no. 33/The Boiling Pot Called Skopje

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

#5 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 Blaže 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 Rendzhov.
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.
#6 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 Čapovski’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.

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