Skopje - Where Time Stood Still (standard:non fiction, 1298 words)
Author: samvaknin	Added: Oct 10 2004	Views/Reads: 3360/2209	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Skopje is a city of extremes. Its winter is harsh in shades of white and grey. Its summer is naked and steamy and effulgent.

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. 



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