Letter From Skopje, North Macedonia

Leaving the Visoki Dečani monastery, I decided to take back roads through central Kosovo to get to the airport and turn in my rental car. I had the option of driving to Skopje and returning it there, but crossing the frontier in a rental car involves paying for insurance in another country and other bureaucratic formalities, which didn’t seem to be worth the hassle.

During the 1999 war with Serbia, Peja was one of the gateways for arms to reach the Kosovo Liberation Army from Albania. In the mid-1990s, the failure of the Albanian government (the successors of Enver Hoxha’s brave new world) put the arms of the Albanian army into liquidation. Then, in turn, many weapons were carried over the mountains and given to the rebelling Kosovars.

Now, in most towns and villages in western Kosovo, there are small memorials and cemeteries—most made of haunting black marble—to those who died fighting for independence.

When I visited Kosovo in the 2000s or 2010s, in addition to farmland dotted with Hoxha’s bizarre personal bomb shelters (concrete igloos), I saw a lot of unfinished houses, many three or four stories high, but often just empty shells.

When I asked about these construction skeletons, I was told that many families, especially those working abroad, would pool their money and collectively invest their savings in a family house or compound.

Now, as I rolled through the Kosovo midlands, it struck me that most of these houses have been finished, testament to the Kosovar savings rate.

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I had thought that after returning my car I would catch a bus from Pristina into North Macedonia. I assumed that somewhere in Pristina that there would be a depot of vans or small buses that make the run across the border (mass transit in the Balkans).

The agents at the car rental company, however, discouraged my optimism. “Maybe there’s a bus,” one of them said. “And maybe not.” I inferred that now in Kosovo, a bit like Los Angeles, everyone owns a car (and many of them are late model SUVs with tinted windows). So I engaged a taxi to take me the 55 miles to Skopje.

Toward the end of the drive, which lasted about an hour, we started driving through the twisting valley of the Vardar River, which in World War I was the object of one of the more ill-considered campaigns in a war that saw its full share of incompetence.

To make the Allied populations forget about the disastrous stalemate at Gallipoli (spring 1915), which cost 250,000 casualties and ended with an Allied withdrawal in December-January 1916, the same Allied coalition landed an army in Salonica (now Thessaloniki), with the the object of attacking up the Vardar valley and getting at the Germans from the flank.

For more than two years, facing an entrenched Bulgarian army in the mountains of Macedonia, the Allies got nothing except more casualties (along the lines of what they suffered at Gallipoli).

In theory, the Allies were showing faith to the beleaguered Serbs—for whom they went to war in the first place. But such was their slow progress in those barren, rough hills and mountains that the Allied invaders were nicknamed “the gardeners of Salonica.”

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Because I had splurged in hiring the taxi, I had the driver drop me in front of the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, which is devoted to the unfinished business of Macedonian independence.

I spent more than an hour making the rounds of the exhibits, many of which feature wax figures sitting at café tables or in darkened caves—smoking cigarettes, drinking raki, and plotting to kill Turkish overlords.

Over the years, I have tried to wrap my mind around Macedonian history, at least its revolutionary side, which began in the late 19th century, notably when IMRO (the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) took up arms against the Turks. But I defy anyone to really understand Macedonian politics, then or now.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the irredentists shot police, mayors, and even unwary travelers in the disputed lands that now lie between Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and North Macedonia—all of whom have made the claim that Macedonia belonged to them.

What put Macedonia in play as a European “question” was the unhappy settlement of the 1877 Russo-Turkish War, in which Russian troops besieged Plevna (in northern Bulgaria), surmounted the Shipka Pass (on the way to the Straits), and descended upon Constantinople, which finally became a Russian warm-water port.

At the 1877 Treaty of San Stefano (it’s now the Istanbul suburb of Yeşilköy), the Russians awarded most of Macedonia to its ally Bulgaria, dramatically reducing Turkey’s footprint in Europe.

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Horrified at the prospect of Russia ascendant in Constantinople and its client, Bulgaria, the master of Macedonia, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, together with an assist from the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, convened the 1878 Congress of Berlin to prop up Turkey (then “the sick man of Europe”) and reduce Russia’s appetite for European influence and Macedonian plunder (via its placemen in Sofia).

But really what the Treaty of Berlin achieved was to put Macedonia “in play,” and ever since it has been a contested killing ground.

The Ottomans remained weakly in charge of Macedonia until 1913, when at the conclusion of the Second Balkan War, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro asserted their Macedonian claims at the expense of the Turks and Bulgarians. Then after Bulgaria chose the losing side in World War I, Macedonia was divvied up between the Greeks and Serbs in 1918.

That division lasted until the German invasion of the Balkans in 1941. With the Allied victory in 1945, Macedonia was largely consigned to Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia—on the Russian assumption that he would be “their man.” He was, until he split with Stalin in 1948. Tito’s Yugoslavia managed to control much of Macedonia until it collapsed in the years after the fall of Berlin Wall.

In the wars of Yugoslav succession from 1992-95, North Macedonia emerged as a newly-independent (and largely bankrupt) nation, yet again distrusted by most of its neighbors.

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In the 1993 author Robert Kaplan published his best-selling Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, which is largely a ramble across Macedonia. The book influenced then President Clinton, who agreed with Kaplan’s fatalistic conclusion that the countries of the Balkans are eternally at each other’s throats. Kaplan also made the point—I’m not sure if Clinton agreed—that the ethnicity of Macedonia is largely Bulgarian.

As best I can figure, Macedonia is a mélange—perhaps half Bulgar, a quarter Serb or Greek (it depends where you draw the borders), and a hodgepodge of muslim Albanians (mostly in the west).

In the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, however, the Balkans on display is that of a dagger to the throat, with endless plots and counterplots, often based on which language or religion is to be taught in the local school. But the rainbow at the end of the “struggle” would be Macedonian independence—its border carved from those of Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Kosovo, and Albania.

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In theory, the European Union was to have papered over nationality conflicts by offering a higher allegiance to Brussels than, say, to Skopje, Belgrade, Sofia, or Salonica. But, sadly the current country of North Macedonia is now teetering on bankruptcy, and its liquidation would raise the same questions of succession as did the 1877-78 treaties of San Stefano and Berlin.

A few years ago, I traveled to a remote corner of North Macedonia, close to the Bulgarian border, and there found a series of abandoned stone villages, a testament to the population drain going on in North Macedonia.

A friend drove me around the villages in his car, and when I asked him why North Macedonia didn’t allow refugees to settle these vacant houses in what were beautiful medieval villages, he looked at me as though I was inviting the Ottomans back into Europe.

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From the struggle museum, I decided to walk along the Vardar River, which runs through the center of Skopje. Façade lights were illuminating the government buildings, including the parliament and many of the upmarket hotels around the main squares just off the river.

As the sun set, central Skopje had a fairy-tale ambiance, although when I walked to the main railway station and beyond, the city returned to its role as a brave old world of central planning, complete with tired apartment blocks that could easy double as ministries of fear.

I ended my walk at the main station, where I went in search of a shuttle bus to the airport. By then it was dark and cold, as only the Balkans can get in winter.

However rundown was the main station, I was happy to see it, as it reminded me of happier times, when night trains connected Belgrade and Skopje with Thessaloniki. Later on, the sleeping cars were scrapped. Now no North Macedonian trains cross its borders; it might just as well be an island.

Macedonia’s disintegration would be ominous for Europe. Even though the average wage today in the country is less than €700 a month, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, and Turkey would all submit claims on its assets and its citizens—assuming that neither Bismarck nor Disraeli is around to adjudicate a settlement to the satisfaction of the great powers.

This is the fourth in an occasional series about travels through the Balkans to and from the Green Line in Cyprus.