Macedonia

I feel like the Republic of Macedonia is Balkan state that gets forgotten a little—but there it is, on the Balkan peninsula, surrounded by Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, Greece and Bulgaria. I always knew that it was next to Greece, but until the last year or so (what with some seriously intense map-studying since I put a world map next to my bed) I couldn’t have reliably named the other countries it bordered. The capital is Skopje—which I have to admit I couldn’t have told you yesterday. This despite the fact that it is an ancient region, and we’ve all heard about the victories of that famous Macedonian, Alexander the Great. (It’s important to note that there is a greater Macedonian region, and that there is a region of Greece also known as Macedonia. This has, in fact, slowed down the process of the two countries reaching an agreement as to what name Greece will recognise the Republic of Macedonia under. Philip II, Alexander’s father, founded the city of Heraclea Lyncestis in 336 BCE, near what is the modern Macedonian city of Bitola. The official name of the country is still under dispute—the UN refers to it as “the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.”) So now it’s Independence Day, celebrating the day Macedonia declared its separation from Yugoslavia in 1991—independence was officially recognised fifteen years ago, in 1993.

Obviously Alexander the Great’s period of, well, greatness, was quite a while ago. The region was under Byzantine control for a while, and when that started to fall apart the Slavic tribes moved in, while some pre-Slavic inhabitants moved to fortified cities in Greece, or hid out in the mountains. The First Bulgarian Empire (did you know about Bulgarian empires? Or that there was more than one?) covered the area that is modern-day Macedonia by around 850 CE.

Then there were the Ottomans. And yes, they parked a good long while—movements to create an autonomous Macedonia began in the late 19th century. In the years just prior to World War I there were the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913—the Ottoman Empire dissolved around now, and the territories were carved up. What is now Macedonia was known as Southern Serbia, and when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia came into being, Macedonia was integrated into that.

During the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, Macedonia managed to remain at peace, making a few minor changes to its border to resolve problems. Then the Kosovo war came along, and Macedonia was flooded with ethnic Albanian refugees—this had a destablising effect. These days things are much better.

And as we’re getting to that stage where I start to talk about poetry, I should mentioned the internation poetry festival known as the Struga Poetry Evenings—it seems everyone who’s anyone has been there since it started in 1962. Brodsky, Neruda, Montale, Heaney, Hughes, Senghor… and the list goes on and on.

Today’s poem is by Zoran Ančevski and comes from New European Poets.


What’s Slouching

What’s slouching like stagnant air
through these Balkan corridors?
Eroded erudites,
plague-ridden radicals,
communists, nationalists,
bloodthirsty ecologists
with milk teeth,
descending form the national parks
with conserved views,
reserved
for outbursts of tribal passion,
Freudian complexes of minimal difference,
for random reservists
and condoms of all different colors too.

Whatever is slouching
will never teach Bethlehem or Jerusalem
nor Mecca or Medina
but hurrying and scurrying
down different European corridors
in red crescent or red cross ambulances
will enter a wilderness of mirrors,

in Versailles,
where terrible tailors
cut out new corridors
and a well-turned verse
is reversed to a stammer.

—Zoran Ančevski
from New European Poets
translated from the Macedonian by Graham W Reid, Peggy Reid and the author