Macedonia - A name with mighty and magic resonance!

Day 1,304, 17:53 • Published in North Macedonia North Macedonia • by DarkoDimovski1
Macedonia: a name with mighty and magic resonance, the name of a place and a people with great historical glory. Its origins go as far back as the 7th century BC, when king Perdika founded the first Macedonian kingdom, which was later strengthened by king Philip II of Macedon and then expanded by means of the sword and the dynastic marriages arranged by Alexander of Macedon all the way to the Himalayas in India and the pyramids in Egypt.

Macedonia: an indelible seal in the world’s memory, a name constantly discovered and rediscovered by ancient poets, wise men, mythologists, archaeologists, travelogue writers, apostles, and prophets. It was not by chance that Gabriel Garcia Marquez opened his famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the masterpieces of the 20th century, with a character from Macedonia – Melquiades, a sorcerer and alchemist of the soul. His name and the name of his people come from ancient times and according to the Bible he was the offspring of Japheth, the youngest of Noah’s three sons. He was given the task of offering spiritual comfort and going on noble missions, thus leaving his traces upon the civilisation of this world before and after Christ.

The gifts that Macedonia has deposited in the European spiritual tradition are numerous and indispensable.

The great truth about the word of the New Testament, full of cosmopolitan love and divine light, was sent from Macedonia to Western Europe by St. Paul the Apostle. He and his follower, the devout Lidia, founded the first Christian church in Macedonia. The third of the four Gospels in the New Testament, St. Luke’s, was also written in Macedonia. Nine centuries after Christ, Ss. Cyril and Methodius, the holy brothers from Solun, started their mission from Macedonia and lit the blazing Word among the Slavic peoples, leading them thus from their spiritual darkness to the light of European culture and civilization.



Macedonia – a name with tragic beauty, with a deep and unhealed wound in the long historical night filled with loneliness after the dreadful defeat of Czar Samuil’s army on Mt. Belasitsa in 1014. Several thousand of his captured soldiers were then blinded and only one in a hundred was left with one eye to lead the rest back to their lost Macedonian homeland through the deep gorges of its ill fate. Macedonia – a wounded tribe that greeted even the new millennium with a freshly inflicted wound. But from its wounds, as if from its fertile soil in spring after a long wintry night, new flowers will blossom. Constantly reshaped, it has instinctively maintained its existence and, like a shell, it impearled its pain with beauty rather than with bitterness, and with such a beacon it traversed the long and hard historical night.

Macedonia has always lived with the utopian vision of Dostoevsky that beauty will save the world. It has become its creed, but this beauty has held within it a tragic character because life in Macedonia for millennia on end has never been easy and favourable.
Nevertheless, like a shell, it still cherishes its impearled pain, and responds to all misapprehensions with love and beauty. Being so small, it even looks like a shell. There is a saying which says that a house should not be built at a crossroads. But the Macedonians did exactly that: they built their home at a point where the roads and a number of dark historical winds coming from the East and the West have met and crossed.

Catena mundi (the Clasp of the World ) is therefore one of the most common archetypal attributes of Macedonia. Naturally, as a specific civilizational epicentre, it could not be circumvented even by the Silk Road. But along with the silk and the golden spiritual values came in ferocious waves a number of ominous horsemen of evil. Culture and barbarism interchanged in a dynamic and violent rhythm. Very much like in the legend about building a bridge: what was built during the day was destroyed during the night. A layer of culture over a layer of barbarism, covering one another until today. And yet the hand that created beauty has always been stronger than the hand that destroyed it. Culture always rose like a phoenix from the ashes of barbarism.



Macedonia – a name with a great past and a secret filled to the brim with cultural and civilizational artefacts and riches – since Neolithic times, the first spring of humankind, until today. Both the material and the spiritual culture in it intertwined in a dense anthropological tapestry, which despite its dire fate bears witness to a bright hymnic existence. It is full of signs that illuminate long dark periods and radiate warmth that has warmed the wounded soul of a people who, since time immemorial, despite barbarism, believed that Beauty would save the world. The courtyards of the Macedonian churches and monasteries are full of holy warriors and angels that defend the divine origin of human existence. They are full of the gold of the Word and the Spirit.

Macedonia – a name with mighty and magic resonance, full of ancient legends, songs and dances, with miraculous embroideries, mosaics, icons and frescos. A country with a primordial natural beauty, which still looks as intact and pure as it did on the day when the world was created, or on the first day after the Flood, washed and gleaming like crystal. The impressive photographs in this electronic publication brilliantly capture its magic appearance, its lavish beauty in which the saints from the frescos on the churches’ walls proffer their hands toward the fields of bread-giving corn and the vineyards and orchards heavy with fruit. They show a kind of beauty before which no one could remain indifferent. Konstantin Miladinov, one of the most lyrical Macedonian poets, described that beauty while studying in Moscow and was exposed to the cold Arctic winds:

There the sunrise warms the soul,
The sunset glows on wooded heights;
There are gifts in great profusion
Richly spread by nature’s power.
Watch the clear lake stretching white
Or bluely darkened by the wind,
Look upon the plains or mountains:
Beauty’s everywhere divine.

The hymnic beauty of Miladinov’s poem, which opens in a deep elegiac mood, gives his beloved country an eternal appearance – everything is beautiful there, not only birth and life, but also death:

To pipe there to my heart’s content!
Ah! Let the sun set, let me die.

This oxymoron is the magic magnet of beauty that Macedonia possesses—a land in which the tragic and the beautiful have always formed an amalgam of existence.

A part of the unfathomable beauty of this country and its people, given in abundance by the Almighty, is also to be found in this publication. It is like amountain spring that fills with ancient secrets the palms of those who want to drink from it.
Vladimir Arsovski’s photographs are a real experience. It is not enough to say that they have been masterfully made. It seems that the camera of this passionate collector of magic sights snatched from the swift current of the Heraclitean river has in itself a secret pupil, an inner animating eye wherein sights pass through and receive an aura of holiness and a pure profound timelessness. Everything appears epiphanic, as if at the dawn of first creation. Not only sacred objects but even the most common, elementary things in nature.



These photographs wonderfully capture both the mythic serenity of the Macedonian landscape and the hymnic music of its elements, be it stone, water, mountain, wind, light, or other. They also capture the sunrises and the sunsets above, and the gilded day that shines like eternity between them. They all spring from one another in a beautiful synaesthetic manner, ecstatically colouring both the silence and sound of that peculiar and magical landscape whose name is Macedonia. The beauty of each photograph in this edition is full of an arcane, primordial freshness, like a butterfly that alights upon a palm and never wishes to fly away.

Who can shout this:

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Macedonia - A name with mighty and magic resonance!