Jajce

Valley behind Jajce

 Today saw a trip to the Central Bosnian town of Jajce, about 80 miles north-west of Sarajevo. Roads are customarily narrow, winding and tricky throughout this moutaninous land, and most of today's route was no exception, featuring long, slow ascents up hill (for long periods behind heavy, antiquated lorries carrying half a felled deciduous wood) and then darting like a falling flash of light down an uncoiling spring, on the other side.

[British Rail Voice]We Apologise for the Disruption to your waterfall. Normal Service will be resumed as soon as possible [/British Rail Voice]

 Jajce is a town not much bigger than somewhere like Pitlochry (though without the tea rooms and array of Edinburgh Woollen Mill knitwear), but is famous for three things. Firstly, a spectacular natural waterfall, the confluence of two Bosnian rivers; normally, water from one river tumbles fifty feet down a sheer cliff-face in a gigantic white streak, into a tumultuous meeting with the other down below. However, at the moment, there seems to be some kind of environmental engineering going on. The river at the top is blocked up with some flimsy looking driftwood, and the huge torrent of water diverted down a metal chute on stilts. This is to allow some workmen to do some shoring up and digging of new foundations at the bottom of the waterfalls normal course, by the looks of things. Several of the town's older residents were keeping a close eye on them as they went about their work this afternoon, and will probably continue their vigil, as Jajce's waterfall is as defining for Bosnia-Hercegovina as Loch Lomond is for Scotland. There was a mechanical digger (goodness knows how it got down there) doing something or other, and men labouring away with the roar of the water in their ears.

AVNOJ in Jajce, November 1943. Tito is fifth from the right in the front row.

 The second thing- and most important for my project- was the little AVNOJ museum, housed in an old Sokol (Bosnian youth movement) building at the end of a small lane, about 200 yards from the waterfall vantage point. AVNOJ stands for "Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council of Yugoslavia", and it was here, on the 29th-30th November 1943, that the leadership of the Communist partisans met to discuss the shape and nature of a post-war Yugoslavia. AVNOJ had an initial meeting at Bihac, some 100 miles away, in 1942, but it as the second meeting in Jajce that was regarded as truly significant- as major decisions were taken that were immediately put into effect after the end of hostilities in May 1945. The museum itself is almost apologetically tucked away, but inside, it is well worth it.

...and as it is today, almost unchanged. Tito's chair was positioned right before the lectern.

 The room itself is little more than a large church hall, but it is preserved almost exactly as it was sixty-eight years ago. There is a truly remarkable replica of Augustinčić's portrait of Tito, in, er, gold-painted styrofoam. Alongside such kitsch, however, is a genuinely interesting historical account of the partisan war as it affected each of the Yugoslav republics, and some interesting photographs of the meeting in progress. Pencil portraits of the Allied leaders- Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, as well as one of Karl Marx, are arranged around the hall alongside the obligatory Tito portrait, in establishing a close link, visually, between the partisan leadership, its political tradition, and its contemporary expression in the fight against the Axis occupation.

The building, subsequently, became a central focus of the partisan legend, and its status as one of the main legitimating factors of Tito's leadership in peace-time. A trip here was a very common experience for Yugoslav schoolchildren, and the name and legend of Jajce was imprinted on their minds in history lessons. A very enthusiastic elderly guide showed us around the place, and there wasn't quite the cloying sense of sadness that I had found at Tito's mausoleum in Belgrade. Yugoslavia may be dead and buried, politically, but there is still the sense of important and significant history- for the whole region- having taken place here, even if the museum's visitor numbers have declined dramatically in the last twenty years.

Looking west-by-north-west from the fortress walls

The third thing that Jajce is well known for is the ruined mediaeval fortress, standing on top of a very steep hill, with commanding views of the town and surrounding valleys. In the brief period of Bosnian independence in the middle ages, Bosnian kings were crowned in this fortress, the last coronation taking place in 1461. After the Ottoman take-over of Bosnian territory, the fortress slowly fell into ruin, although the irregular outline of the walls and ramparts are still very clear today. The views of the surrounding valley and the town (even if someone's bonfire seemed to be somewhat out of control, cloaking the centre of the valley in thick white smoke) were absolutely incredible, on a clear, crisp autumn afternoon. Remarkably, too, I found a patch of wild thistles growing within the fortress walls. So, if, in future years, you hear of a new team called "Jajce Thistle" storming the Bosnian leagues and then papping out one of the Old Firm in the Champions' League qualifiers, whilst you're on your summer holiday, I'll probably have had something to do with it.

Jajce Thistles

In more recent times, Jajce featured as an outriding venue for the '84 winter Olympics, and launched a campaign to be recognised as a UNESCO world heritage town, which is still ongoing. In the 1992-95 war, the town suffered a good deal, and was the subject of intermittent fierce fighting, being eventually captured by Serb forces. However, the Dayton agreement awarded Jajce (not without some controversy) to the Bosnian-Croat federation, and it remains within this part of Bosnia today. Tourism, winter skiing, and agriculture keep the inhabitants here going.

The drive back through Travnik, the town made famous by Ivo Andrić's Bosnian Chronicle, in the gloaming, was memorable. Bosnia is softly, gently fading from summer green to autumn gold.

Tomorrow it's Mostar: then, I had an e-mail saying I could go and visit the closed National gallery and see the collection on Monday. Happy days!

Belgrade: "The House of Flowers"

Tito's grave, House of Flowers

Just as a brief aside, I went yesterday to the Museum of Yugoslav History, a little bit to the north-west of the city centre. This complex was established by Tito in his dying years, and as well as providing a truly vast exhibition space, it is also the former Yugoslav President's final resting place. Tito's mausoleum was designed by the ailing leader from around 1974, in close collabroation with his favourite architects and sculptors.

It may not suit some of today's ultra-nationalist historians to remember, but Tito's death in May 1980 was met by genuinely felt grief across the former Yugoslavia. The most graphic illustration, perhaps, was at the football match between Croatia's Hajduk Split, and Red Star Belgrade from the capital; the game was stopped, half way through, to announce the death, and both sets of players wept openly. (Red Star went onto win 3-1, a victory that would normally have ensured substantial bragging rights for their fans, but the result went by almost unnoticed.) On the same night, as you can see in this youtube clip, the TV newsreader struggled and largely failed to keep a check on his emotions:

Tito died in hospital in Ljubljana, and his body was carried around all parts of Yugoslavia before being laid to rest at the House of Flowers. It's a marker of how much has changed in the subsequent thirty years, that an ex-JNA Colonel, having re-trained as an academic following the end of Yugoslavia, is now selling his self published book on Tito from the back of a battered Lada Zhiguli outside the museum.

Jovanka Broz Tito getting off an aeroplane, Belgrade, 1959

There are two very comprehensive fashion exhibitions on at the moment; one focuses on Tito and his very glamorous second wife, Jovanka; the other, perhaps more interestingly, focuses on fashion in post-war Croatia, up to around 1960. This exhibition well illustrates the difficult post-war transition Yugoslavia underwent, from being a ruined country destroyed by four years of occupation and bitter, bitter civil war, to building up the infrastructure of a flourishing consumer goods sector, alongside a re-building of industry and a (controversial and costly) re-organisation of farming.

Croatian fashion, May 1945: Partizans liberate Jelačić Square in the centre of Zagreb

Croatian fashion c. 1960: a woman at work on the "Highway of Brotherhood and Unity" between Belgrade & Zagreb

Elsewhere, the museum features well-tended grounds, featuring works by Yugoslav sculptors very well known for public commissions and portraits of the party leadership, particularly by Antun Augustinčić, who died the year before his biggest patron. The mausoleum itself is rather odd. Shorn of its honour guard (Milošević ordered the removal of a military presence at Tito's grave in 1990, as part of a so-called "detitoisation" process), Tito's grave seems almost incidental, a mere curiosity to visitors, in between two rooms exhibiting all of his many batons (!) and a rather dull room full of delicacies and trinkets donated by fellow members of the "Non Aligned Movement" ( a group of countries started by Yugoslavia in the Cold War, as aligned fully neither with the Western nor the Soviet blocs.)

The exhibition space here is rather fascinating, but the overall impression of the mausoleum is one of a cloying sadness; that of a great historical figure from a time past, little remembered or noticed in a fast moving contemporary world, in which his ideas and concepts no longer really apply.

Skopje (part two)

So I'm sitting writing this in an open air cafe on Makedonska Square, the central point of Skopje; the sun is beating down and it's about 35 degrees, with the air conditioning hissing under the umbrellas. As it's Sunday, town is quiet; if people are in the sun at all, they're taking it very easy.

Skopje bakes in the Friday lunchtime sun

This is my second time in the Macedonian capital. I came here on holiday a couple of summers ago, and since then, the city is suddenly undergoing a huge re-building programme. There is an absolute orgy of new public sculpture, in what must be the biggest government investment in new monumental statuary anywhere in Europe. Two years ago, this square was still a largely empty Tito-era parade ground and mass rally space, the centre point being a rather nice circular display of amber, red and blue local flowers. Today, the place where the flowers were has vanished, to be replaced by a truly gigantic bronze statue of Alexander the Great on horseback, balanced on a marble column about thirty feet in the air. Alexander can be seen from pretty much everywhere in the centre of the city.

Makedonska Square and Alexander the Great from the Stone Bridge. I'm writing this under the umbrellas in the shade to the left

This bronze behemoth would be more than enough to attract the eye, but the square is also now choked with other figures from the new narrative of Macedonian statehood; Tsar Samuel, Goce Delchev, other patriots, warriors and churchmen from history. The overall effect is rather claustrophobic; one can't really stand back and look at the sculptures individually, without being physically aware of the presence of others looming very nearby. For sculpture to work, of course, scale and proportion in relation to the physical environment is as important as a successful three dimensional image; it seems that scale and proportion have been deemed of secondary importance to the need to have a graven image of absolutely everyone near to hand. The sculptures continue across the ancient stone bridge, the enduring symbol of Skopje's survival and permanence; on the other side of the River Vardar, there is effectively a giant building site, as a new government and civic quarter is created. Two new mock-classical buildings are arising under a dense network of scaffolding and clamour of building noise; it is going to be a new museum of "Macedonian struggle", and some government structures, with the workies already having finished the new foreign affairs building on the other side of the stone bridge.

21st century classical architecture rising on the banks of the Vardar

This frenzy of new architecture and sculpture is part of a government plan to re-design the city centre by 2014; the authorities have already spent 200 million euros on statuary alone (and it shows); the new buildings will cost at least three times that. A complete new Skopje tramway is also planned, presumably in order to retire the fleet of local, very old, clouds-of-diesel-fumes buses that chug around presently. For some, these monumental new structures are a symbol of Macedonia emerging from a tough and contested first twenty years of independence, towards a hoped for prosperous future in the EU; for others, it represents an overblown, pompous and inappropriate historical classicism, ignorant of Macedonia's Albanian and gypsy minorities, and ruinously expensive in a country where up to one in three adults of working age are officially unemployed. It's not for me to say who is right, but the overall effect is odd and unsettling; a newly populist, right wing version of Macedonian history, in conflict with its Yugoslav architectural past.

Typical Skopje apartments

Re-invention, however, is not a new thing for Skopje or its citizens. 80% of this city was destroyed in a massive earthquake, in July 1963, with tens of thousands killed, injured and missing. The old classical Skopje disappeared in a few minutes. In response, Tito and the Yugoslav government issued a major call for international aid and invested heavily in rebuilding the ruined city. A Japanese architect worked with locals to redesign the city entirely; the result was the emergence of a plantation of tower blocks and wide boulevards. Only one small corner of Makedonska Square gives any evidence of the old classical appearance of Skopje. Just outside the central block of few streets, wide highways are choked with traffic, and one has to be rather careful crossing the road, even when the green man is showing.

One of the by-products of the earthquake was the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which sits just behind the Kale fortress, on a hill overlooking the city centre. At present it is closed, but it re-opens on Tuesday night, with a major exhibition of Macedonian art since independence. Macedonia celebrates its twentieth anniversary as an independent country on Thursday; on 8 September 1991, 74% of the country voted to secede from crumbling Yugoslavia, with the only completely peaceful withdrawal of the Yugoslav National Army negotiated shortly afterward.

Basketball frenzy in Makedonska Square

To the casual visitor, Skopje might appear to be a drab place, but this first impression is unfair. At night, it is very lively indeed, with packed nightclubs along the River Vardar, busy restaurants, and the customary Macedonian sight of large family groups and friends out for a leisurely evening stroll. It's also worth putting in the effort to walk as much as possible; many of the most interesting places are hidden up side streets, such as a tea and hookah garden; little more than a small wooden hut with some outdoor sofas, at the end of an entirely unremarkable one way street. Skopje is also quite a book town; I have browsed through two or three excellent bookshops, whilst mobile carts of books can be found on most streets in the city centre. The charmingly entitled Macedonian for Foreigners was a bargain at just 250 denars (£3.50).

There has been a celebratory mood here, this weekend, too. Yesterday, the Macedonian basketball team- for the first time ever- triumphed in a bitter derby battle with the Greeks, by 72-58. I know virtually nothing about basketball, but apparently that's a bit of a gubbing. The entire square was filled with celebrating Macedonians last night, with the large electronic screen turning off its rotating series of adverts and replacing it with an image of the red and yellow Macedonian flag. On the boulevards, long, slow moving queues of cars filled the air with a tremendous din of tooting horns; a young bloke hung almost completely out of the passenger side of a Zastava Osmica, the boxy outline of the old grumbler almost completely obscured by a gigantic flag. I suspect there may be more celebrations tonight, as they are currently beating the Finnish team, as well.

Yes, it really happened. Makedonija 72: 58 Grcija

There was an edge to the Greek game, of course, as successive Greek governments have been implacably hostile to the emergent new Macedonia since the 90s; complaining about its flag, its name, its aspirations to integrate fully with international institutions; Greece has been quite ludicrously intransigent on all these issues. Even Barack Obama was moved to declare himself "bored" of the Macedonian-Greek quarrel a few months ago. However, given the catastrophic extent of the current Greek financial crisis, they may well have expended their political capital on these issues, and Macedonia may finally be able to progress a bit. It could be argued, of course, that the sudden sprouting of the Makedonska square statuary could be some kind of sculptural response to a national identity that feels itself threatened.

The very existence of an independent "Macedonia" makes some Greek politicians nervous; the new national narrative, with Alexander the Great at the centre of it, irritates them enormously. That said, the Greek suspicion that Macedonia will some day lay claim to the part of Greece also named "Macedonia" seems, to this observer, paranoid. The number of Macedonians dreaming of a "greater Macedonia", incorporating ethnic Macedonians in present day Greece, Bulgaria and Albania, would struggle to fill a Transit minibus. Yet, the contents of that hypothetical Transit have been enough for the Greeks to throw up every obstacle in the way of Macedonia integrating fully with instituions such as the UN, NATO, EU accession talks, and so on. In its first twenty years, Macedonia has been locked in a permanent existential crisis, with the Greeks openly skeptical of its national aspirations; Bulgaria has tempted some Macedonians into claiming Bulgarian citizenship (the lure being an EU passport, and he ability to move and work in the EU without a visa); there was also a threatened very nasty ethnic conflict between Macedonians and Albanians, at around the time of the Kosovo conflict in 1999-2001, although that, for now, has been peaceably resolved.

The captivation of the locals with the successful exploits of the basketball team couldn't be in starker contrast to the rank indifference shown to the national football team's ailing Euro 2012 qualification series. The Macedonians played Russia on Friday night, with John Toshack in charge for his first game as national team manager. I was one of only three people watching the game in the pub (indeed, there was more causal interest in the Scotland-Czech Republic match, yesterday afternoon). Macedonia played quite well, and were unlucky to lose 1-0 to a very unimpressive Russian side. They looked decent both in defence and midfield, but carry no real threat up front. It will be interesting to see how the gifted but cantankerous Welsh nomad gets on here, as the basis is there for a decent and competitive team, that both Scotland and Wales will find difficult in their 2014 World Cup group.

Street in Skopje's bazaar

Today I've been for a leisurely stroll around Skopje's old bazaar, a tight warren of streets located around three separate mosques. The call to prayer echoed across the largely empty streets at 1pm. In the weekday, this place is busy from dawn until dusk, with a myriad of small shops, a fruit market, and a series of permanently popular cafes. Today, it was very quiet, so I was able to get some decent photos.  The bazaar was founded in the sixteenth century, and although it is now designated as the "old commercial centre", it still seems to trade very briskly when open. As with the much smaller bazaar in Bitola, trades, leatherwork, exchange bureaux and food sellers predominate here; there is also another gallery of modern art, located in an old Turkish bath house, that I will return to later in the week.

This week is my first full week of work, and I have several meetings with art historians, artists and curators lined up. I am also going to have a very close look at the collection in the Museum of Contemporary Art, and there is an archive from the old Soros Centre here, that chronicles Macedonian contemporary artists in some detail, which I will need to spend about a day in. As for on here, I'm going to write a detailed entry later on about my project, for those who want to hear more about that; there should be another couple of updates from Skopje before I leave for Belgrade next weekend.

More photos can be seen here

Bitola & Kruševo

Mount Pelister from Stiv Naumov street, Bitola

Well, my first day working on my project today, and what an absolutely remarkable day it's been.

I arrived in Bitola yesterday- the second largest city in Macedonia. It's a fairly interesting place, known as "the city of the consuls"- during the latter days of the Ottoman empire, Bitola was a centre of diplomacy, with many countries basing their representatives here. There are still a dozen or so consulates here today, although how active they are is a moot point.

"Sirok Sokak", Bitola, Monday evening

The centre of Bitola is officially called ul. Marsal Tito (Tito Street), although no one actually calls it that- it's known by everyone as Sirok Sokak (Wide Street)- in the dimensional, rather than the Scottish, sense of "Wide". This is also a remnant from Ottoman times in Macedonia. Sirok Sokak is the main social and shopping street in town; I'm just back from there, and it is absolutely mobbed- at 9.30 on a Tuesday night, in a manner frankly unimaginable in old stomping grounds such as Dundee or Perth. At the top of this thoroughfare, there is a statue of the ancient Macedonian king, Phillip II, a melodious clocktower, and two very impressive mosques. Behind the mosques a little bit, there is the Stara Carsija or old bazaar. In Ottoman times, this was a centre of artisanry and trade- apparently, at one time, 250 different trades were crammed into this claustrophobic rabbit warren of narrow streets. There are still trades there today, albeit in far fewer numbers; the main source of business now seems to be leatherwork, parts for 1980s cars ranging from Yugos and Ladas to Escorts and Sierras, and, er, a shop selling scarves for the local football team, FK Pelister Bitola. Pelister are at a low ebb however, having been relegated from the Macedonian Prva Liga last season- so they really must be dreadful.

Dalmatinska ulica, Old Bazaar, Bitola

Bitola is not a city for the street-sign dependant map readers amongst you. Street signs, even in the city centre, border on the non-existant, whilst directions to other vaguely important places- Skopje, for example- seem to date from the Yugoslav era and have either worn away or are falling off the lamp-post. One has to navigate by a mixture of landmark, repetitive walking, and osmosis. It's a city, too, where clear signs of the Yugoslav past remain; not only the obligatory regular monuments to fallen partisans from the great struggle of 1941-44 (the Bulgarians had been booted out of here by late 1944, by the Macedonian partisan brigades), but also street names that have mostly been replaced in other ex-Yugoslav countries. Here, streets are still named after Lenin (Leninova), and long forgotten Yugoslav Communists such as Eduard Kardelj, Ivo Lola-Ribar, Boris Kidric, and Ivan Milutinovic. Partisan heroes are also commemorated- Stiv Naumov- alongside martyrs of the Illinden period. Macedonia seems to have the least amnesiac relationship of all the republics with the Yugoslav past. For every Macedonian nationalist, who bemoans the "lost" parts of Macedonia, in present-day Greece, Bulgaria, and Albania, you'll find someone who bemoans the end of Yugoslavia, and the apparently easier life of those times.

Kruševo from the Martinovski museum

Enjoyable though Bitola is- another real livewire of a place at night- the spectacular highlight so far has been today's trip to the little mountaintop village of Kruševo, about 30 miles north-by-north-west of Bitola. I drove there this morning for my first day of research, and after hesitantly sputtering along a slippy and rutted tarmac road, which featured spectacular hairpin bends for the last twenty or so kilometers, I was richly rewarded.  As well as being a modern day ski and winter sport centre, Kruševo is significant both in Macedonian history and the Macedonian present; firstly, as the seat of the Illinden uprising of 1903, against the rule of the Ottoman empire; secondly, as home to the "first Macedonian modernist" Nikola Martinovski; and, thirdly, as home and location of a memorial to the "Macedonian Elvis Pressley, Tose Proeski. It's also, nearly 4,000 m above sea level, the highest town in the Balkans.

I began by trying to find the Martinovski museum, eventually discovering it at the end of a narrow cobbled street, about ten minutes from the centre of the town. It is located in a lovely old town house with spectaclar views of the rooftops and the surrounding mountains. A grey working donkey, tethered to a pile of logs, was honking and braying loudly into the bargain, just below the museum walls, in between munching on what seemed to be a gigantic pyramid of carrot peelings.

Nikola Martinovski, Wet Nurse, 1948.

Nikola Martinovski died a few weeks before I was born, in early summer 1973. Five years before his demise, the federal Yugoslav government provided the money to buy this handsome building in Kruševo and do it up, to house the majority of his paintings. In 1924, Martinovski left Macedonia for Bucharest, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts for three years; after completed his studies in Romania, he spent 1927-28 in Paris, spending time working at the Grand Chaumière, under de la Bissière and Moise Kisling.

On his return to Yugoslavia in 1928, Martinovski participated in the first showing of contemporary art in the Macedonian capital, and was part of a pan-Yugoslav modernist grouping called Oblik ("Form"). He was to spend the next 45 years in Skopje, with regular visits to Kruševo and to Paris to see old friends. Martinovski was a good example of the strong Francophile orientation that inter-war Yugoslav painting had; his work shows a thorough understanding of the work of Modigliani, Matisse and Chagall. During the war, Martinovski contributed visual images and propaganda to the partisan struggle; a study of a partisan, completed in 1944, still forms an important part of one of the rooms.

Martinovski's wartime work and pre-war fame ensured that he was well-placed to play an important role in the Yugoslav art world, during the presidency of Tito (1945-80). He exhibited regularly in Skopje and Belgrade, and was a significant academician and art world politician in the 50s and 60s. In the post-war period, Martinovski chose to concentrate on the themes of family, motherhood, and social studies of everyday life in Kruševo. This collection is extremely interesting and wide ranging, featuring oil painting, drawings and lithography. Although Martinovski is little known outwith the former Yugoslav countries, his work is well received and popular; in Macedonia, his work enjoys the same kind of status that a Fergusson or Peploe does in Scotland.

The extraordinary monument to the Illinden uprising (1972-74)

The real surprise of the day, however, was the monument to the Illinden uprising, on the crest of the hill about 2kms from Kruševo town centre. Briefly (you can read the wikipedia article linked to above), the Illinden uprising involved macedonian and Bulgarian peasants rising against ottoman rule, in 1903; a ten day "independent republic" or Kruševo was declared. The Ottomans put down the revolt with pitiless harshness, liquidating the independent political leadership, conducting a wholesale massacre of the civilian population of the town, and handing out long sentences of imprisonment or deportation to many survivors.

The monument to this tragic incident in Macedonian history was first conceived as a project by the federal Yugoslav government in 1972; the remarkable structure was opened to the public in August 1974. Conceived by the sculptor Jordan Grabuloski and his architect wife Iskra, this is probably the most unusual and extraordinary building that I've ever seen. Featuring biomorphic sculptural reliefs, beautiful blue and green ovoid stain glass windows, and an exterior that is part Rollerball, part over-sized limpet mine, part Le Corbusier on powerful hallucinogens .

In Yugoslav times, the monument was supposed to stand as a symbol of the centuries-long struggle for Macedonian freedom from oppressive imperial rule; a struggle that, back then, was supposed to have reached its peak with the establishment of a Socialist Republic of Macedonia, within a broader Yugoslav federation. The interior decorations present the Illinden uprising as a premature revolutionary outburst doomed to failure from the outset, lacking the necessary Marxist understanding of history alongside atavistic nationalist sentiment. In this way, the monument marks the appropriation of a nationalist uprising by a broader state-socialist, Titoist ideology; it opened on the 71st anniversary of the uprising but, more importantly back then, it also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first meeting of ASNOM (the Anti-Fascist Liberation Council of Macedonia- the wartime military-political umbrella body that resisted fascist occupation in this part of the world).

Whilst the main accounts of the Yugoslav partisan war, by Milovan Djilas and Vladimir Dedijer, focus on the struggle against the Germans and Italians in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia, here in Macedonia the struggle was run almost independently, under the leadership of Svetozar Vukmanovic-Tempo; Tempo accepted Tito's overall supremacy in Yugoslavia, under AVNOJ (Anti-Fascist National Liberation Council of Yugoslavia), he had a largely free hand in Macedonia to conduct resistance to a rather savage occupation by Bulgaria. Little is available in English on the subject of the partisan war in Macedonia.

Stained glass glows through one of the main portholes of the monument

These days, of course, the Communist iconography is little understood, and the Communist interpretation of Macedonia's development is flatly rejected as outdated and anachronistic; the building now is a cradle of Macedonian nationalist sentiment, with a new nationalist narrative from Illinden, to secessionist upheaval in the 1920s, to independence in late 1991, now suggested. Aesthetics aside, it is this tension in function that makes the structure so fascinating; as a monument to the Macedonian past, filtered through the Lens of Titoist and Yugoslav ideologies, now re-interpreted for a post-Communist present. the building is at once a virtuoso display of the vibrancy and invention of Yugoslav socialist modernism, at the same time as being a contemporary tombstone for a thoroughly dead ideology.

A giant portrait of Tose Proeski faces his monastery and memorial

 Just how much has changed since the disintegration of the Yugoslav federation in the early 90s can be witnessed by the monument to the Macedonian folk and rock star, Tose Proeski, which occupies a large space at the bottom of the hill, under the Illinden monument. Before his death, Proeski invested heavily in a monastery and space for spiritual contemplation; he was killed, at the horribly young age of 26, in a car crash in Croatia, in October 2007. I know nothing about Proeski's music, but he is one of the few figures in post-Yugoslav times who has an eager following all over the Balkans. Several busloads of tourists were in attendance at his memorial and monastery today, and local flower, teddy bear and bottled water sellers were doing a brisk trade out of the back of their Stojadins.  Religion was grudgingly tolerated in Tito's era but the emergence of Proeski as some kind of uncanonised saint in the last four years shows just how quickly the Macedonian Orthdox faith has expanded to fill the yawning ideological void left by the end of Titoist socialism.

Tomorrow I'm off to Prilep, the artist's colony and tobacco town. I've had a great start to my work today, if Prilep proves to be only half as interesting as Kruševo has been today, then I'll be content.

PS, if you're not on facebook, you can still see the full photo set relating to this article here

Since Bratislava : Rijeka

Having finally prised myself from intriguing Bratislava on Friday, I'm now just finishing a very quiet four days in Rijeka. Travelling on your own can slightly take its toll and after a hectic fortnight I've been in the mental decompression chamber, getting used to being back on my tod. Or, to put it less pretentiously, I've been sunbathing and reading a lot.

Rijeka is a busy Croatian port, and smaller than I had expected it to be. Folk here seem to be always on the way to somewhere else, rather than staying here for a holiday; boats go to Croatia's coastal fleshpots of Zadar, Split and Dubrovnik, as well as across the Adriatic to Italy. It's also a very striking town. On the crest of the mountain, six Tito-era towerblocks dominate the skyline; Rijeka tumbles down the mountainside beneath these Marxist exclamation marks, an Italianate-Habsburg blend of apartments and fabulously ornate churches.

It may seem remarkable now, but for eighteen months or so in 1919-20, this city was a key issue in geopolitics. The Treaty of Versailles awarded the former Austro-Hungarian Pflaum to the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, despite the city being populated by an Italian majority. Nationalist Italians, moreover, were somewhat aggrieved by their paltry share of the spoils of the Great War, and targeted the city they called Fiume as their own. A ragtag force of small naval boats and Heinz-57-uniform-varieties of militia, led by Gabriele d'Annunzio, seized the port in the name of Italy and wouldn't budge despite the protests of the new Belgrade government, and the severe censure of the authorities in Rome.

D'Annunzio, up until then, had been best known for writing some pretty poor poetry, for a dabbling with the Futurist movement, and for a wartime exploit. This involved him taking off in an Italian bomber (defined back then as a home made birdcage, powered by two manually cranked sewing machines, with a thick rubber band as emergency back up), and somehow finding his way to Vienna, where he launched a couple of stink bombs, and a French letter filled with water, over the side, at the unsuspecting Viennese. This fourteen-hour marathon earned d'Annunzio huge plaudits in Italy and, with the initial success of the Fiume adventure, he seemed well placed to assume the leadership of the Italian irredentist far-right, to the consternation of the then little known Benito Mussolini.

The new Italian government needed little encouragement to distance themselves from the actions of a man regarded as a deranged crank by many. D'Annunzio and his irregulars were eventually obliged to withdraw, after a serious pounding of the city by the Italian navy, that he stood no chance of resisting. Nonetheless, the adventure in Fiume has since assumed something of a romantic and daredevil status for some historians, as in Mark Ledeen's account written in the late 1970s, The First Duce: d'Annunzio at Fiume. Looking at this incident more cold-bloodedly, it seems obvious that the prototype for Italian fascism received its first test in this place, and its lessons were not lost on Mussolini, who grappled his way the the leadership after d'Annunzio's subsequent disgrace in polite Italian circles. The Italians returned during the occupation of 1941-45, after which the city was incorporated into Socialist Yugoslavia. Oddly, Tito was to have his own "Fiume" moment after 1945; he occupied Trieste, gave it the Slovene name Trst, and only budged in the early 1950s when the Americans threatened to forcibly remove his troops.

The only traces these days of this Italian period in Rijeka's history is the main traffic boulevard called Fiumara, and those slatted, louvered window blinds that protect interiors from the fierce sun here. I'm writing this at 11 o'clock at night, and it is still 33 degrees. The weather has been astonishing; it only seems to get dark here for around six hours, and the sun at midday is as fierce as I've ever experienced. Rijeka, having been fully industrialised in the Tito period is these days a bit of a party town outside of working hours; Korzo and Riva streets are absolutely choked at the weekends, though I've been keeping my head down. One man I spoke to shook his head sadly and said that there had been very little work for people here in the past few years, although the town seems affluent enough.

Korzo Ulica: Rijeka's main drag

Art wise, there's not much to report. There is a museum of contemporary art here, but it is closed for a mixture of summer holidays and re-hang. This building also contains a manuscript in Glagothic script - one of the early touchstones and validators of present day Croatian identity, leading some publications to claim that Rijeka has a central place in the modern Croat sense of self, though I'm not really sure how true that is. There is an exhibition of Marcus Doyle's photographs, entitled rather unpromisingly Rijeka Souvenirs but that's been closed as well- a pity, as I like his work. The City Museum, where I had been hoping to see some more of Rijeka's startlingly rich history is, you've guessed it, also closed, though it should be open. And there's a Torpedo Museum. Yes, that's right, a torpedo museum. Apparently, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, Rijeka was at the forefront of torpedo research and development, but I decided to stay in the sun instead of looking at endless technical diagrams and models of long forgotten ordnance. A few menacing metal marine cigars sit rusting in the museum's grounds, surrounded by long grass.

This week's a driving week. I have to find my way down to Ohrid, in Macedonia, by Thursday, where I am booked in for the weekend as the very last few days on my holiday. So, I have an overnight in Zagreb tomorrow, a short hop of a couple of hours, then two marathon drives; from Zagreb to Kragujevac, the Serbian Detroit and home of the Yugo, for another overnight, then Ohrid the next day. Both these journeys are between 6-8 hours on roads of steadily reducing quality and safety, so I shall look forward to getting those behind me. After my final fallow weekend in Ohrid, I'll be starting work by going round Macedonia anti clockwise: Ohrid-Bitola-Prilep-Krusevo-Skopje, the capital, where I shall stay for about a week-ten days. Bitola, the week after this one, will be the southernmost point of this long trek.

Next update from Ohrid probably over the weekend.