Tag: Skopje

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Episode II: Tasos the Buffalo

Thessaloniki, Greece

Fickle are the emotional meanderings of solo travel, and touching down in Greece after almost two days of frustration elevated my spirits substantially.  I had only to get to the station to catch the next train to Skopje, and after talking to a security guard, had only to find a bus to take me there.  Outside, a double-length city bus is waiting, and as I get on as the only occupant, I ask the driver if this goes to the train station.  He smiles and gives half a head nod.  I am not confident.

“Train station?,” I ask again.  He downgrades the smile to a befuddled grin, adds a shoulder shrug and does away with the half head nod.  I try my limited German: “Bahnhoff?”  Again, same response.  Eff it; it’s late and I am tired.  I open my hand to reveal a stack of change, the first of many times I entrust my money to the honesty of strangers, and he gives the universal hand-and-arm signal, that touching of pockets usually reserved for able-bodied beggars and methadone addled youth that says “sorry, no change.” It is my turn to shrug and half-smile, and I take my seat for my own private ride to the I’ll know it when I see it Thessaloniki train station.

For the first ten minutes, I am alone.  But the airport is on one side of the second biggest city in Greece, the train station on the other, and two a.m. on a Sunday morning in any big city can quickly turn into a side-show.  There are the typical black leggings and mini skirts, plus face piercings and fake leather jackets, faux-hawks and vodka residue emanating from twenty-something pores. Admittedly, this is just a single, long stretch of road in a big city, but she is not pretty.  Graffiti is the theme of choice, and it blankets the square, angry stanchions holding up building after building of six- to eight-storey cut-out structures on either side of this main drag.  It is a bit shabby, I suppose, to personify a stanchion, but if you saw them you would think that building is mad at something. Through the windows and opened doors of the bus I see a man driving his moped the wrong way down the narrow sidewalk; a giant dog lays sprawled in front of a store entryway, guarding it through intimidation more than skill; a young man and woman, she a midget and arguably a cross dressing one at that, board the bus at one stop and get off at the very next.  The city outside the window goes by in stops and starts; nothing on this road seems to be built outside of the 1970’s and they are a blur of geometrical, unspirited grayness.  Even the dilapidated government buildings look more Disney Land Haunted Mansion than Foundation of Democracy.

It turns out I do not, in fact, know the train station when I see it, and the bus driver unhappily stops a block and a half past my stop after I muscle my way to the front of the bus to tap him on the shoulder.  It is nearly 3 a.m., and the train station, battered and dirty, is not open.  Dated font Greek block letters above the entrance doors foreboding, a few homeless men and apparently at least one other early traveler, she with an old hardside suitcase, gather under the overhang and out of the wind and chill. In front there is a plastic-blanketed shop selling snacks and porn, the man behind the narrow sliding plexiglass window confirms for me that this is the train station. I ask if I can catch a train to Macedonia from here.

“Yugoslavia?,” he bellows.  He is portly and bearded; an unkempt but kind face. “No,” I answer, clearly missing my cue, “Skopje.”

“Skopje is in Yugoslavia,” he says sternly, though I have no doubt he understands my intent. He is giving me a lesson.  “This is Macedonia.”

Though we stand (he sits) in current day Greece, this was once Macedon, home of Alexander the Great and the kingdom of one of the greatest empires to ever govern the earth.  Greeks are justifiably proud of their history – Herodotus, perhaps the father of history, was from here – and so me calling Macedonia “Macedonia” has touched a nerve.  The new Macedonia, or the more geeky “FYROM” (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) has been a country only since 1991, and the Greeks, or more specifically the Macedonian Greeks, are not happy about it.  I buy a beer, an Amstel Light tallboy, exchange introductions, and then ask Tasos about Kosovo.

“Yugoslavia?,” I ask.  He answers yes.

And Bosnia? “Yugoslavia.”

“Montenegro?” He looks at me over the top of his glasses.  “Yugoslavia.”

I ask where Alexander the Great was from, and he answers “that goes without saying.”

I laugh, crack open my beer, dig my fleece cap and gloves out of my backpack, pull them on tight, and look over the newspapers.  I have noticed, in the short time I’ve been in Greece, that all the anglicized versions of Greek words look to me like some variant of “Vasili Tasikos,” prior to five minutes ago the only Greek guy I knew.  I drink my beer quickly and buy another, again holding out a palm of coins to Tasos and letting him take what he needs.  I stand next to the ice cream refrigerator, cold but out of the wind so warmer than anywhere else.  A homeless guy and I share a 10 meter cheers over our Amstel Lights.  There is warmth in unity. I pepper Tasos with questions until he finally, during a pause, says “Jack, come inside and get warm.”

Tasos Vouvolis – he says his last name means buffalo – has been working here at his uncle’s shop for almost ten years.  He is also a plumber, but says business is not always good, so works here on weekends. His English is good, his voice the temper of an ascetic rather than a non-native speaker reaching for words. Tasos talks about the Greek economy; his concerns that because Macedonia has unfairly taken the name Macedonia (Tasos prefers they left it to history), who knows what else they will take; about Gypsies; about America and our wars.  A man buys a porno mag, Tasos first puts it in a clear bag but then switches to a non-transparent black bag because the man “is shy.”  He comments softly on each customer: he is a country boy, he is a methadone addict, he is a taxi driver, he doesn’t know what he is.  I count the different number of cigarettes Tasos has for sale, and come up with 267.  He teaches me “neasa kala” as a farewell – be good, be well – I teach him “keep it real.” It matters not that I never talk like this; “keep it real” will leave Tasos in good stead whether he travels to America or sits here for the next ten years and talks with the occasional American.  I run across the street to buy Tasos and I a snack. I do not know how Europeans continue to get away with putting a fleshy pink hot dog in a croissant and calling it a breakfast pastry.  Tasos serves me Russian tea, and then it is 5:30 a.m. and the train station doors open and though I am already feeling only goodness, the opening of doors has lifted me.  I am on my way.

**************

I count six people waiting for the Thessaloniki to Belgrade train, though I will get off in Skopje, Macedonia.  The train waits for us, so covered in graffiti I mistake it for scrap, cars waiting to be cannibalized for other, functioning trains.  An official looking man directs me to stop taking pictures and then tells me this is the train to Skopje.  It is a rolling museum, urban modern art on the outside and communist bloc remnant in.  But it is clean, and empty, and I can sprawl out in the darkness facing forward, my shoeless feet resting on the seats in front of me, marking the beginning of the rows of seats facing towards me, ambidexterity on rails.

I drift in and out of sleep, I am a moderate insomniac despite, or because of, two bedless days on my feet and closing my eyes only on airport and airplane seats.  I wake to slivers of sunlight coming in through the right hand windows, cypress trees outlined against a rising sun.  A man comes through the train to ask us for our papers, and as I begin to shuffle through my back pack he lazily throws his left hand at me, letting me know not to worry about it.  He is a universal bureaucrat, not a greenhorn looking to make his name but a man beaten down by years of repetition and nepotist supervision, he is a casual participant in the process.  He does not need my ticket; he practically regrets his authority.  I am clearly a foreigner and a paying customer, and there is no reason I would be sneaking into his country when his experience says I should be sneaking out.  At the lonely Macedonia border I spy a Nirvana poster and hope it is both the literal and the figurative.

Two hours later I deboard in Skopje, and a man immediately accosts me and offers a taxi.  He says he was a translator for the Americans and KFOR for ten years.  I tell him I would rather walk, that I like the feeling of a pack on my back in an unfamiliar city.  He asks if I need a hotel, I tell him eventually, and he says he is not familiar with the Hotel Eventually.  This is, I think, a good beginning.

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Episode III: Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

I exit Skopje’s train station, ignoring all calls of you need a taxi but still curious about the professional courtesies of underemployed taxi drivers.  They stand close together, smoking cigarettes and talking until someone walks by, disengaging from each other long enough to shout out four or five you need a taxis. Some are more aggressive than others and will crowd you for a few steps, quietly pointing out the folly of you walking somewhere when you could oh so easily get in my taxi.  Very cheap.  But I continue on, doing my best to discreetly carry my two-inch thick guide book, as if the back pack and tan cargo pants somehow aren’t enough to give me away.

After ten minutes walking the wrong way and one solicitation for directions to the city center, I arrive in downtown Skopje to see a city under construction.  Skopje has a walled Old Town, but the new town has fences as well, seemingly around everything.  At my hotel (the Hotel Square, a “Unique Solution”) I ask the young man at the desk about the all the work going on.  Alexander tells me it is new government and international money, and they are not only restoring infrastructure, but building monuments as well, “to Alexander and King Phillip II.”  Perhaps Tasos’s fears weren’t misplaced.

I check in, drop my bags, and ask Alexander for dinner recommendations.  He tells me only to “watch out for small gypsies,” saying “watch” with that throaty “hwa” sound for which no character exists in the English alphabet.  I go out, promising to keep my eyes peeled for small gypsies, and find a city all to myself.  It is a Sunday in the tourist off-season, but I am exhausted so it is just as well.  I eat, read about Alexander, and drink several of the local beers before dragging myself to bed.  Skopje TV, after hours, turns into a soft-core pornography telethon, and there on my television screen are several not-small ladies in varying stages of undress and all wearing hands-free headsets.  They are apparently answering caller requests, unimaginative ones at that, though clearly talking far more to one another than to lonely men on the telephone.  It is sad and a bit pathetic, on many counts, and though I am exhausted, I watch it until I see one of them turn around on the couch she’s sitting on, placing both hands on the back of the couch and causing it to break, her and the girl next to her tumbling over the collapsed couch and away from the camera and into a girl standing upright behind them, frilled buttocks and camisoled shoulders everywhere.  Perhaps the callers aren’t so unimaginative after all.

I wake, early and refreshed, and cross the Vardar River over the six-hundred year old Stone Bridge and into the Carsija, Skopje’s old town.  People are up and about and moving with a purpose, everyone bypassing a red-panted yellow-jacketed older man with darker skin and shoulder length oily black hair.  He stands erect, looking straight ahead but at nothing, hand extended and palm up, distinguished all the more so for his colorful clothing in a black denim city, stark; a cigar store Indian on a centuries old Balkan bridge.  The Carsija is centuries old as well, left over from the Ottoman Empire, and has been the cultural center of the city since around the year 1400.  It is alive this morning, children and adults alike passing through on their way to tend to Monday’s activities, though the lack of tourists allow the adults time more social than business.  I pass by idle shoe-shine men, unambitious watch and trinket stands on the cobble-stoned streets, groups of men gathered for coffee.  I spend the day in the Carsija, drinking coffees, eating stewed lamb and kebabs, baffled at the dizzying number of jewelry shops, and envying the camaraderie of the Pit Bazar, the farmer’s market.

In the afternoon, on my way back across the now packed Stone Bridge, I am accosted by three or four adolescent, slightly soiled children.  A boy stands in front of me, blocking my way, one hand holding his stomach, the other alternating between touching his lips and holding his cupped palm out to me.  He feigns mute; his face is dirty, hair matted down and clothes shabby, face distorted to indicate his near-tears hunger.  I am not sympathetic, I saw this kid in the Carsija, early morning, his frosted-tip hair massaged into a faux-hawk, running and laughing with his friends, I had made a mental note that here was a trouble-free kid, trendily dressed, who I could place in just about any city in the world and he would not look particularly out of place.  But now here he stands before me, tragically without voice, nutrition or hair product.  I tell him I am on to him, that I saw him earlier, and that he should ply his wares elsewhere.  No matter his English skills, the tone is clear and he immediately gets the gist of what I am saying.  He quickly switches tactics to flattery, smiling and grabbing my chest, one hand on each pec, telling me how strong I am.  He follows with a bodybuilding pose down, and though I laugh, I am not moved and I tell him to “beat it.”

And then he turns on me.  Sliding one step to his right to let me by, he relieves me of a banana, jammed into my backpack, quicker than alligator jaws.  I am alerted only by his laughing friends, and I turn to see him just out of reach, cradling my banana like a baby, cooing to it, rocking it, letting the banana know everything will be OK despite its switch of parent.  I want to grab him by his Adidas jacket and dangle him over the bridge.  He is not intimidated, and now he holds the banana seductively, kissing it lightly, provocatively, eyeing me the entire time.  His handling of the banana, a sick pederast version of licking the last piece of candy so your friends won’t eat it, gives him the win: the banana is his.  I turn and continue across the bridge for home.

I return to the Hotel Square and tell Alexander about my interaction with the locals.  “I told you,” he says, “to hwatch out for small gypsies.”  Alexander then tells me that if I see a gypsy man I should punch him.  I start to laugh, but Alexander is serious.  “If you are walking and you see a gypsy man, and he is maybe one or two man away from you, you should go to him and punch him.  In the face.  It is okay.”  I am not entirely confident in my gypsy-identification skills – in my mind they all look like Little Steven – and though I’m not sure how the justice system works here in Macedonia, I am not comfortable using “I thought he was a gypsy” to vindicate a hate crime.

****************

The next morning I plan to rent a car and drive to Ohrid, a mountain lake town in southwestern Macedonia two and half hours from Skopje.  At the rental car agency, a Donald Sutherland look-alike takes my credit card and driver’s license; he wears a thick brown rolled-neck cardigan, rectangular tortoise shell glasses hang from a chain around his neck.  His beard and hair are the yellow-gray of a chronic smoker, he gives the passive air of intelligence of a liberal arts college professor.  I ask for a map and he gives me a cartoonish, 3D folded version of just Skopje, and in Cyrillic at that.  I ask for one in English, but he only says it is no problem, Ohrid is “that way.”  Ohrid, in Cyrillic, looks enough like “Oxpna” that I am willing to take my chances, so I get into a car so small I am sure I can lift it in any emergency situation, turn on the radio to hear the tail end of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” followed by an accentless American voice proclaim that I am listening to “MACEDONIA’S NUMBER ONE RADIO STATION” and make a left turn onto the busy streets of Skopje.

There is something to city driving, particularly when you are accustomed to a short, relatively traffic-less commute, and city driving in a foreign county is especially exhilarating.  I dodge pedestrians, speed past Yugos and dive in and out of lanes, here letting a faster car pass me, here moving out of the way of an oncoming bus in the suicide lane, here deftly avoiding the cars parked half on the sidewalk, half in the right-hand lane: I am dialed in.  And the car man is right, Ohrid (Oxpna) is, in fact, that way, and soon I am on to the empty, melting-snow wet E-65 highway first to Tetovo and then Ohrid.  The sparsely-treed mountains, early spring snow and village towns look enough like my own Sierra Nevada’s that I wonder if they are close in latitude (I find out later they are less than 100 miles apart), and I immediately feel at home.

The city of Ohrid is on a lake of the same name (again, Nevada: Lake Ohrid is a visual twin of Lake Tahoe, or Tahoe of it, and they both sit half in one state and half in another), and people have been living here continuously since 400 years before Jesus was born, his influence to spread here to Ohrid some 900 years later.  The city has been ruled by Greeks and Macedons, Bulgarians and Romans, Seljuks and Normans, Ottomans and Serbians, and most recently Yugoslavs under Josep Broz Tito, but it is, at its innermost, ecumenical – a 5th Century Ottoman traveler noted 365 chapels within its walled Old Town.  There are several still standing today, and I have my choice as I again have a centuries-old city to myself.  I walk into the curtilage of the Sveta Bogorodica Perivlepta, an Orthodox church constructed in the late 1200’s.  There are cats – Ohrid is, as many of the cities I visited, overrun with cats – but no other humans as I walk once around the outside before entering the church itself.  I pay, and the woman behind the plexiglass – Jana Popaska, Doctor of History – asks me if I’d like a guided tour.  I accept, and watch as Jana clips on a laminated badge, presenting her as a “UNESCO Tour Guide.” She steps outside the booth and shows me the badge, as if to eliminate any confusion as to who is guiding and who is being guided.  She wears a white and black leather jacket, too much make-up, long black hair braided in two strands down to her waist, and her enthusiasm is infectious.  The interior of the church is covered with frescos painted in 1295, Jana tells me, by the painters Mikhail, Carlos and Nikolai, and for the next thirty minutes Jana holds my rapt attention as she covers the frescos, the church, Jesus, love, politics, Bulgarian tourists, God, and the state of the economy in general.  We stand in the center of the church, and rotate slowly in a clockwise direction as Jana first whispers the titles of each of the frescos and then follows with a description.  The Birth of Jesus, she whispers, then practically shouts EXPLANATION!

I gather my thoughts, but it is not a request, it is a declaration, and Jana explains to me The Birth of Jesus (EXPLANATION!), doing the same with The Burning Bush, The Death of Jesus, Jacob’s Ladder, The Death of Mary and several others, following each whispered title with an emotive explanation.  Her emotion would shame any other tour guide, her idolation of Joseph evident as she tells me he was 87 years old when he married the fourteen year old Mary, treating the child as a daughter and not a wife; her sadness clear as she, near tears, recounts the distraught Mary upon learning of the death of her only son.  She whispers Jacob’s Ladder, then explains that though there are many explanations, her favorite is that of Saint Gregory, who described each rung as a year in life, ascension from earth to heaven possible only by living a life of virtue, by striving to love my fellow man and to worship a loving God.  There is no Serb she tells me, no Croat no Muslim no Christian no American no Ohrid and no anything except for the love of life, and a loving heart and a loving God.

She ends abruptly, as if someone else had been giving me the tour, and apologizes for her voice which she says “sounds like a musician.”  She tells me she had taken a pill a little earlier to make her happy but she fears it has only made her crazy, and I tell her no, your voice is just like music.  We part, Jana telling me she will pray for me and will ask God to protect me wherever I go in the world.  I tell her thank you, and that I think, after today, I need it a little bit less.