On that wintry Sunday morning, nothing was open yet, there was nobody on the streets I could ask, so I killed the next three hours wandering around the various sights of Skopje, or least those along the Vardar—my only point of reference in that city, which I had just set foot in for the first time. Around nine, a few shops started opening. I recall that I bought a bottle of water, but my tooth was already hurting so badly that I couldn’t even open my mouth to take a sip. So when I saw a working pharmacy next to a church on the other side of the Stone Bridge, it seemed like a little Christmas miracle to me.

The pharmacist told me that she had studied in Bulgaria, so she was able to understand me no problem. I poured Aulin in the bottle and somehow managed to drink it. I immediately felt relief. In the meantime I saw a sign with the name of the church and remembered that on Easter I had watched a video on Facebook about the miraculous glow of all saints’ halos. I went into St. Dimitar’s church, Sunday mass was in full swing. Of all the people there, I was the only one paying attention to the “old news” of the glowing halos on the otherwise smoke-darkened frescoes. The mass was in Church Slavic and on the whole was pretty much the same as in Bulgaria. Right then, however, they started reading the gospel. In pure literary Macedonian.

I’m not going to touch on the debate about the Bulgarian and Macedonian language, let’s leave that to the realm of diplomacy. I will simply admit the obvious—to the ear accustomed to Bulgarian, everything in Macedonian sounds terribly funny. Even a serious book like the Bible. But the opposite is also true—perhaps for the first time I realized this there in St. Dimitar’s. There was no way the gospel could be read in standard Bulgarian (even though little more than a century ago, the Skopjians themselves were fighting with the Grecophiles precisely over this). For everyone besides me, it would have sounded absurd and ridiculous. To the ear accustomed to Macedonian, everything in Bulgarian sounds terribly funny as well.

Incidentally, when I was little, my father taught me fractions with the following problem—he would quiz me about my grandparents’ family trees and then would make me calculate what percentage Macedonian I actually am. The answer—my paternal grandfather’s parents (from a village near Kostur, now Kastoria in Greece) and my maternal grandmother’s mother (from Resen). One fourth plus one eighth. 25% + 12.5%, or 37.5% in total.

So it was completely natural that when in 2019, the opportunity arose to go on a writer’s residence in North Macedonia, I didn’t hesitate for an instant. I wanted to feel that 37.5% more fully, to get acquainted with Macedonian language a little better, and at the end of the day—to try living in Skopje, the nearest European capital to my Sofia.

I arrived during an unimaginable heat that stuck to my clothes the second I poked my nose outside. For that reason, I more or less only went out to go to the store, and the rest of the time I watched Macedonian television, tried to grasp the logic of the Macedonian alphabet and spelling (at a certain point I got used to the absence of Ъ, the Bulgarian schwa, even in words without a single vowel, such as tvrd “hard” or tsvrst “firm,” and streamed the show “Prespa,” which I found funnier and funnier, now not only because of the language itself. It took me some time, of course, to figure out that in Macedonian vreden actually means “useful” (and not “harmful” as in Bulgarian), which struck me as one of the best metaphors for all of the arguments between Bulgaria and North Macedonia.

One of the first Skopje natives I met over a beer was Duško Krstevski—the translator of almost all contemporary Bulgarian writers. And again because of the language dispute, the more precise word when it comes to poetry, he explains to me, is not prevodach “translator,” but prepeyuvach “re-singer or transposer”—not someone who translates, but rather who sings something in a new key, at least that’s how I understood this “transposition” or re-singing from Bulgarian into Macedonian. An elegant way for the world of literature to escape from the world of diplomacy. Our Skopsko beer went down very smoothly.

On a quick evening walk I made the rounds of the sites around the Vardar and the so-called Antique Disneyland, which in any case I had already seen on that winter Sunday with my paralyzing toothache. From then on, the real enjoyment for me began—the unfolding of the city. First, I got to know Debar Maalo, the neighborhood where my apartment was. With its pubs and bars, it turned out to be the true heart of the city.