Three days in Macedonia

Independent since 1991, Macedonia sits squarely in the middle of the southern Balkans. Blessed with natural beauty, friendly locals (especially when compared to their more dour Bulgarian neighbours), and a meat-heavy diet to put Argentina to shame, Macedonia has suffered, unfortunately, from calling itself... Macedonia.

In perhaps one of the more mystifying and long-running international disputes of modern times, Macedonia is provisionally known as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM, in the international arena due to a disagreement with southern neighbour Greece. For the Hellenic Republic, the fact that Macedonia has chosen to call itself Macedonia – in addition to claiming Alexander the Great as its own – implies a threat on the Greek province of Macedonia, which includes Thessaloniki.

Quite how one of the poorest countries in Europe, with an ethnically and religiously divided population of 2.1 million whose Albanian portion led a brief insurgency in 2001, would one day seize a significant chunk of the European Union’s southeastern flank is a question beyond many of us, but Greece has continued to delay Macedonia’s accession to some international organizations until a name more suitable than “Macedonia” can be found to replace the tentative FYROM. Greece has floated a number of suggestions in the past, such as the “Vardar Republic of Macedonia (Vardar being the name of the river that runs through the capital Skopje), or the “Central Balkan Republic” (Central African Republic, anyone?), but the suggestions have not elicited much Macedonian approval. As for Macedonians, the only thing they are sure of is that they are Macedonians.

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The road from Istanbul to Skopje nominally takes about 13 hours, although such an optimistic number naturally fails to account for the usual tribulations of trying to cross an international border. With checks, re-checks, officious officials, bored officials, non-existent officials, and officials perpetually on break, frontiers, especially Turkish ones, are places where time slows down to an excruciating snail’s pace and travelling 50 metres takes the best part of 4.5 hours.

Moreover, frontiers, especially Turkish ones, are also places where “buying” cigarettes for the bus crew is not so much seen as an act of kindness by the passenger, but as an semi-obligation necessary for onward travel. The process requires no financial input on the part of the passenger – all that is required is a passport. Accustomed to the semi-mandatory trip to the duty free to buy cigarettes on my passport, I willingly went again this time to the shop with the driver, expecting to have a carton or two put on my passport. The crew, instead, put nine cartons on my passport – 108 euros or 1800 cigarettes worth – and did the same for seven other passengers.

A merry two hours was thus spent finding various innovative and novel places to stick some 14,400 cigarettes (72 cartons or 864 euros worth of cigarettes) so as to avoid detection by the border authorities of various countries (penalty for the discovery of one carton: 100 euros, allegedly). Safely through the border with our cache of carcinogenic goods, we eventually continued on the road to Macedonia.

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With a reputation for being one of the drearier Eastern European capital cities around, there is little to detain the traveller in Skopje, other than perhaps the prospect of excellent Albanian-style kebap.

Indeed, while the capital and its cuisine reflects the ethnic and religious diversity of the country, which has a majority Orthodox Macedonian population but significant Muslim Albanian, Turkish, and Roma minorities that one seems to encounter everywhere, there are more delights to be found elsewhere in the country, including the breathtaking 12^th-century monastery of Treskavec outside Prilep.

Treskavec lies at the top of a two-hour climb up a dirty, muddy road on top of a rocky outcrop – a position that has prevented it from being benighted by souvenir stands and bus tours.

Today, Treskavec is home to a single monk, an economist by training who found God when he was 26.

With subject matter like religion (obviously), nationality (it seems few in the Balkans don’t have an opinion on the matter), the European Union (“Why should a bureaucrat in Brussels give me lessons about tolerance? Western Europeans are busy electing Islamaphobic far-right demagogues while Christians and Muslims were living here in peace a century ago”), sport (it was the first time I had discussed hockey – ex-Vancouver Canuck Ed Jovanovski is of Macedonian heritage – with a monk on a mountaintop), the name issue, and all other matters of Macedonian minutiae (trivia question: What city has the second largest Macedonian population in the world? Toronto), there was more than enough to talk about for five hours with the Skopje-born brother.

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Of course, there are other sights in Macedonia as well. While cold Bitola can claim to be the country’s former leading city, as well as the location where the future founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, did part of his schooling, today it feels like many other Eastern European cities – not in the sense of ubiquitous and depressing concrete apartment blocks, but in the new sense: one main pedestrianized drag that has been sanitized of its difference from other cities in the region and furnished with cookie-cutter cafes and the same global brands that feature everywhere from Sydney to Sofia.

This notwithstanding, Bitola is still a refreshingly progressive city, although it has the unfortunate distinction of being outshone by nearby Ohrid, Macedonia’s crown jewel. With a serene and expansive lake, old Ottoman quarter, and picturesque monastery that featured in Macedonian director Milčo Mančevski’s 1994 film, Before the Rain, Ohrid is a delight.

Ultimately, many places are labelled as “being on the crossroads of civilizations” (irritatingly so if only because it has become a cliché); Turkey is certainly one, although Macedonia could certainly be another. Once colonized by the Romans and later by the Ottomans, Macedonia retains the influences of both and more. With a long history of Christians and Muslims living side-by-side in relative peace – the fighting of 2001 notwithstanding – perhaps Macedonia does have something to teach the Geert Wilders of the world about tolerance and integration.

Photos:

1) The 12th-century of St. Bogorodica, generally known as Treskavec, sits on top of a mountain close to the city of Prilep

2) The approach to Treskavec

3) A square in Ohrid, featuring a 900-year-old plane tree in the background

4) Popeye the Sailor stands in front of Sveti Jovan Monastery on Lake Ohrid

5) Sveti Jovan