Plasterish-polyesteric–baroquish Macedonia

After each blushing of cheeks, during visits of foreign guests to the Macedonian capital, to whom I must explain that we are not people who are collectively on hallucinogenic drugs, but that we have our own, rich history, and that Skopje’s abduction by those who are untalented in arts and politics, is not something the ordinary people wished for, who are struggling to survive… I don’t know if I should wash myself from the embarrassment of the others, or just kill myself.

By: Sinisa Stankovic

And, I write in all the media with which I cooperate, about the shame, the ugliness and the scars upon the face of the, once beautiful Skopje, just so that I could save my soul. As I, like all the other grumps in front of whose astonished looks rose the “world capitol of kitsch” in just six years, was writing about some other things: about the filth in politics, about the devastating economy, about the thefts, and as if I didn’t have time to realize what was happening to us. And I was mocking the creatures whose lives had failed, who stumbling on the unfulfillment of all of their plans, decided to ruin the physiognomy of my home town.

I wrote about the “Burek (pastry) – Baroque”, about the “Balkan version of Las Vegas” and about the transformation of the City of solidarity into a City of chaos, into a scenery for a creepy tragicomedy on the spirit of the Small town…I also wrote about the one with no under pants, and about the eternal flame that was constantly extinguished, and about Karev’s hand placed in a beggars position (big as the shovel of Alija Sirotanovic), because we are miserable and cursed, and because our souls have been taken away by the “reformers” who have been picking our pockets 24/7, and even through the monuments, we are yet to beg for help, so that we can pay back the debts…). And I was joshing the faceless creatures of the fuhrers of our streets and alleys, who wanted to create a “baroque” past for us with Styrofoam scenes, a past a bit better than ours, which was not good enough for them, so they over did it and greedily reached for what is not theirs, and the saying “cut from the behind – to patch up the ears” planted in the wrong way, just doesn’t seem to make it here on the Balkan grounds, because it cannot live under the Macedonian sun and the Vardar wind.

I wrote, but not sufficiently enough, and I even screamed on the streets, but, not – enough! While we were laughing at their narrow-mindedness, they were “realizing”, not only their bank accounts, but also the crazy plans of all those who hate (and it’s not only Skopje, they also want to disfigure Bitola, and if you let them, they will also destroy Paris, if only they had the chance…), of all those who hate the CITY, because they are afraid of it and know that they don’t belong in it. And that is why we are here today, as we are. And we can either pray, appeal, warn.. as we have until now, or, we can from now on think about how we are going to give back Skopje its spirit. And what are we going to do with the thousands of tons of plaster, and concrete and iron?

Because, the polluters, the enemies of the greenery and trees (that reminds them of the things they ran away from, when they firmly swore they would never come back),  those fearing the third echelons, are just a pair of tongs in the hands of the creators of the monstrous plan for restructuring and disfiguring, a scenario that includes disassembling everything valuable and of quality, and replacing an absolutely strong material old several centuries with hollow structures. With phonies…

The screenwriters did not like their grandfathers, so they wished for their fathers to have been raised by others, in order for them to rejoice with titles… The Macedonian history was not sufficiently noble for them, the real one, the enslaved one, yet rebellious, the rural and migratory one, yet durable like wheat grass…nothing was enough for them, so with manners of a theft – “hand quicker than eye”, they plastered a sort of new one out of clay, their version, the exclusive ones – the nobodies, who renamed Aleksandar to the Warrior and Bucephalus to the Horse.

They wasted day after day our future, shortening the lives of our children and grandchildren. They built a fair with a rollercoaster on which they put entire Macedonia to ride on, to scream with closed eyes and to pray to Jesus and Allah to find someone normal to turn of the switch, to stop the plunging..they wasted 630 million euros, and don’t care at all about the 600 thousand youngsters that have scattered across the world, running away from the nightmare. They have been increasing the public debt by a million euros each day, for eight years, building a useless gate for all ecstatic – triumphant defeats and mistakes in the assessments (which also, what a miracle, they renamed it to “Macedonia”) where the only thing that can be done is for parents to send their children running away to save their lives…

I and the people I communicate with, have laughed whole heartedly at these people, however, they, the “persistent” ones, kept carrying out their suicidal agenda,  sticking us deeper in mud, in quicksand, in the heath of their horror – ideas: for building a new national identity, for a new history (which, normally starts from them and means deleting and sorting everything that has formed and maintained the young state for seven and a half decades), for a new adjective for Macedonia, which is not richly- patterned as the fruit salad anymore, neither is it biblical in spite of the new churches in Skopje, nor Slavic unfortunately, but rather….plasterish - polyesteric–baroquish…