Hotel Arka

It’s funny how the closer you get to everything you want, the more you become a slave to ever-more base desires. Macedonia is one of those places that defies imagination because everyone seems to want a piece of it -- in Italian, the word ‘Macedonia’ means ‘fruit salad’, apparently because it is such a mix -- of people, of cultures, who knows, to them it is just a salad. But looking down from the smooth glass elevator of the Hotel Arka in Skopje, coming down from the seventh floor with the swimming pool in front of a big open window overlooking the old Turkish bazaar with its ruinous hammam, one can’t help but notice that this cool modern glass tower is surrounded by shacks in various states of disarray. As late as 2001, this place was at war. But then you stroll down by the river Vardar and feel unsettled by the vast swaths of outdoor cafes with the coolest of enamoured youth basking in their cappuccinos and feeling the rush of entering Europe for the first time without ever leaving their city. ‘We should have something nice like this in Rome’ I comment dryly. Yet in the crisp evening air, you can sense the fear of success; the nearer it appears on the horizon, the more they become enslaved by those innocent and not illegitimate longings for the nice things in life: the storm of plenty clouds the streets with noise and smog -- it’s a scene you wouldn’t expect to see in Eastern Europe, where stolid 1960s socialist architecture vies with the even-more distasteful budding of Euro-capitalism.


For all they like to pretend, this is not exactly the back corner of the world. Alexander the Great came from here, as well as the family of Cleopatra, and Mother Theresa was born just across the river from the Arka. In the 9th century, monks travelled here from Greece and Rome to teach the newly arrived Slavs about Christianity in their own language – this was long before the schism when the Roman church declared itself independent of that in the Eastern Church established by Constantine. Then the Ottomans came with their Islam and tea-drinking. Macedonia marks the mid-way point between civilizations, between faiths; everything here seems more complicated but simple, just barely touching the east and yet consciously hovering against the West. In the end, I was told by one local inside a medieval church filled with gloriously contemplative icons (I thought it was the Byzantines that didn’t like the icons!): “When the day of judgement comes, we won’t be asked, ‘Are you Christian or are you Muslim?’. We will be asked, ‘Are you a kind person? Have you been good to your neighbour? Have you been loving and generous?’”. Makes one wonder what all the fighting’s about, but there is a deep-seated anger in this place, down on the stubbly streets of the old city, over beer with beans and sausage cooked in terra-cotta pots, encircled by cats in the afternoon sun. The further you drift away from the source of illumination, the brighter it becomes.

These icons peer down at you from timelessness in every corner of the city and you feel the full depth of their belonging a higher spiritual plain, beyond religion, beyond love and hate. The air is extremes of hot and cold, the people are stern but generous. The young men’s eyes peer down at you from square faces like objects of devotion; there are dark symbologies running below the surface here, something you can just barely perceive in their faces but which runs deep, stirring their emotions as they sip their tea and the women browse hungrily through the green market. There are flowers everywhere here – lilacs – growing out of every seam in the city and carried in bunches on Easter Sunday. This Macedonia is the spot right in the middle of the world where you leave a part of yourself, a repository for all the most serious aspects of humanity to stir and fester, and never quite escape history even as you try to forget.