YOUNG GENERATION'S GUIDE-BOOK FOR THE LOST CITY
TheSixties in Skopje
...A City of goodwill, balcanic picturesque neighborhood life. The time of Yugoslav popular music and Italian canzones, smuggled jeans, shoes, jackets and hopes. A City in the time of facing the first lies, ideological hypocrisies, and intimate betrayals of the "human socialism". The period of the discovery of the West with it's mercantile challenges and material benefits. A City already filled with everlasting generation conflicts and human dramas, for the first time living through the moral conflicts of an environment crucified between tradition and poverty. Mixture of nostalgia and drama in the play that starts in this city full of memories and human life battle. The time of the firs socialist disappointments. A play that starts on May 9, the Day of Victory, and ends on July 26, the day of the defeat of the city, struck by the disastrous earthquake. The catastrophe that took over 1,000 human lives. Some of them, maybe, are the ones shown in this play.
The language spoken in this play is the specific Skopje-dialect of the Macedonian language.
It takes place exactly 34 years ago, when everything was different. When there was not enough mercantile, but much more ethical material. Today, in the era of transition, the memories of that brighter period of human and moral values are distant and gentle, but also soul-stirring, like the...
Velyo, the manager of a textile store, hopes that the socialist chairmanship of his company is about to award him with a medal for labor results. He buys cloth for a new suit which he would wear at the awarding ceremony. Velyo is a small man, modest, honorable and traditional. He is a member of the Communist party, and sees his medal as a reward for all of his sacrifices done for the higher causes...and people. Rada, his modest wife is filled with joy and hope, seeing Velyo's medal as promise for a better future of the family. Their only son Panche, however, finds their hopes to be foolish. Panche together with Nakyo, a renowned smuggler, enters the business of smuggling jackets from Trieste in Italy. His mother feels that their son is breaking away from the traditionalism and the moral of the family, and very soon sees her family in an unavoidable conflict.
Velyo buys the foreign, imported cloth for his new suit from the store where he works. The cloth is purposed for the privileged clients of the higher government ranks. However, there is a shortage of the special imported textile. Velyo's boss and childhood friend Sime condemnes the store worker Tinka being giulty about that shortage.
Olya is a ballerina whose parents are imprisoned for political reasons. Secretly, she sends them packages in the prison. Mustache, an agent of the notorious political police, uses that to blackmail her, asking her for sexual favors. Olya, though a lonely and promiscuous person, on the other hand despises him and refuses his bids.
The Captain, an officer of the Yugoslav People's Army, is a Serb married to Eugenia, a Macedonian with whom they have four children. His eldest son Dejan is the biggest disappointment to his conservative father, simply because he is - a ballet dancer.
After a bitter fight with his mother, Panche leaves to Trieste on a "business trip". He comes back from his smuggling adventure, beaten by the police which previously arrests him and Nakyo. His father is about to get the medal. His mother tells a bitter monologue on peoples hopes, cursing the material challenges and the new times which make them unhappy.
Olya finally surrenders to Mustache's persistence, and one day they go to a restaurant. There, Tinka the store worker and also Mustache's ex-wife appears and makes a scandal asking him to pay for the medical treatment of their ill daughter. Mustache refuses her. She is forced to steal money from the textile store. However she can't stand the pressure and hangs herself on the day when Velyo is about to receive the medal for labor results.
Velyo and Sime enter the store that night. Velyo is angry because he didn't get the medal, and Sime explains that he didn't get it because he didn't agree with Yugoslav resistance against the Soviets in the famous "case of the Informburo" which had happened in 1948. "You have a mark in your life", Sime tells him. Sime also says that Velyo has been put under surveillance. "What happened to the people?" - Velyo exclaims - "We were all of the same textile, only the tailor who cut us out was lousy." Their conversation transforms into a bitter fight, and after Sime leaves, Velyo dies of a heart attack in the textile store.
The Captain and his family move to Bosnia and Herzegovina - "the nicest of all Yugoslav republics, where they love the army most" - as he says. Nakyo is released from the prison. Panche stays with his mother, working in the textile store where his father used to work. As a manager of the store, he hopes to be awarded and buys cloth for a new suit.
The circle reopens once again...that night when the catastophic eartquake takes place in their dramatic lives and city.
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