Elusive centres of a Balkan city: Skopje between undesirable and reluctant heritage

ABSTRACT

This paper examines competing forms of heritage in central Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia. It shows how Macedonian law came to officially protect the city’s Old Bazaar as cultural heritage of special importance in 2007. Yet the Bazaar constitutes a ‘reluctant heritage’ because locals have associated Ottoman-period architecture with Albanians, amidst ethno-political tensions between Albanians and Macedonians that have persisted since the socialist period. This heritage coexists in an uneasy tension with another ‘undesirable heritage’, namely, that of the socialist modernist architecture erected after a 1963 earthquake.  In addition to tracing these competing forms of heritage, this article discusses the effects of the ‘Skopje 2014ʹ project and underscores the relation of state-power to processes of heritage-making and gentrification in the city.

KEYWORDS:

• Skopje
• Ottoman space
• socialist heritage

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Victor Friedman, Natasha Tolia, Erich Fox Tree and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and editing the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This article touches upon different historical periods: Skopje’s old Bazaar goes back to the period when the city and the entire Macedonian region were part of the Ottoman Empire (until 1918), the period when Skopje and the part of Macedonia that was not annexed by Greece and Bulgaria, the so-called Vardar Macedonia, part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1918-1944 (also called Great Serbia). The discussion on socialist and post-socialist Skopje refers to the periods when Skopje is already capital of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia (1944-1991) and Republic of Macedonia as an independent state (1991-present).

2. For this idea of a ‘reluctant heritage’, I draw on Lynn Meskell’s concept of ‘negative heritage’ (2002) and Sharon MacDonald’s ‘undesirable heritage’ (2006).

3. This section builds on the Aleksandra Krstikj’s (2013) research conducted as part of her doctoral dissertation at the Faculty of Architecture in Osaka University, Japan.

4. Waqf is the term for a charitable endowment under Islamic Law, which usually involved donating a building, plot of land or other assets for Muslim religious or charitable purposes with no intention of reclaiming any financial benefits (for more see Gaudiosi 1988).

5. The Great Turkish War consisted of a series of conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League, made up of the Habsburg Empire, Poland/Lithuania, Venice and Russia.

6. More detailed guidelines regarding the Program for the Reconstruction of Skopje’s Old Bazaar and Fortress after the devastation of 1963 were published by the Institute for Urbanism and Architecture - Skopje (Krstikj 2013).

7. This acronym VMRO-DPMNE stands for The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization–Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity(In Macedonian: Внатрешнамакедонска револуционерна организација– Демократска партија за македонско национално единство).

8. Bouzarovski insists that the rebuilding of Skopje resulted in the construction of 35,500 new dwellings during the 10-year period after the earthquake, that were further supplemented by the 4250 private family homes built by the city’s inhabitants with their own private funds (Bouzarovski 2011, 267).

9. Interview with Konstantinovski aired on 09/07/2016 on the TV channel 24vesti.mk

10. Video interview with Mulichovski for the news portal ‘tvnova.mk’ conducted on 18/05/2013 (https://novatv.mk/petar-mulichkovski-skopje-2014-e-glupost-i-sram/).

11. After meticulous research, BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporters) prepared a detailed website outlining the costs for the Skopje 2014 project (http://skopje2014.prizma.birn.eu.com/en)

12. This is best illustrated in the comparative analysis of four Central Asian cities, in which Alexander, Buchli and Humphrey (2006) contrast the post-socialist life of Almati, Kazahstan, Ulan-Ude and Astana and the shift from the sense of certainty allocated to urban citizens as engines of regional development during Soviet times to the conflicting and different expectations of the four cities in which Almati and Astana received new political capital and have taken over the earlier superiority of Kazahstan and Ulan-Ude.

13. Balisti were members of the organization Bali Kombtr who were fighting during World War II alongside the Italian and German occupiers and were involved in the occupation of Western Macedonia by the Italian forces.

14. I owe this formulation to one of IJHS’ anonymous reviewers.

Additional information

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Rozita Dimova

Rozita Dimova is Associate Professor of Southeast European Studies at the Department of Languages and Cultures in Ghent University. Prior to joining Ghent University in 2015, she was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (2003-2006), at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University in Berlin (2006-2009) and at the Institute for Slavic Studies at Humboldt University (2010-2015) in Berlin.