Probably like most people, the first time I went to Struga was for the Struga Poetry Evenings. The international poetry festival, which was established in 1962, has been Struga’s strongest mark for half a century. During my first visit, the Golden Wreath, that prestigious world poetry award, was given to the great Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. The writer Jordan Plevnesh took me there. I was amazed; not only by the presence of famous poets from all over the world, but also by Struga’s magical landscape, the buildings, the history, the way life pulses in this tameness on the northern coast of Ohrid Lake.
“Yes, even reading about the history of Struga, the poetry capital of the world, excited me. And, I feel that excitement will last until I return home. One of the main sayings that I will repeat will be: “I was in Catena Mundi, the heart of the world, where all the worlds collide and a place that holds the way out of the universal loneliness”” – as Chinese poet Lu Yuan said after his visit of the town of the Miladinovci brothers.
It is precisely the revivalist spirit of Dimitrija and Konstantin Miladinovi which has erected Struga to the honorary place on world’s cultural map and because of that the poetry festival in Struga has been held under the protection of UNESCO over the last few years. The younger brother, Konstantin, while staying in the far away Russia, asked for eagle’s wings in his verses, so he can come home to see Ohrid and Struga, in the nostalgic poem “Longing for the south”.
Kingdom of poetry
The kingdom of poetry has been ruling Struga over the last half a century. For five decades the international festival of potery “Struga Poetry Evenings” has been growing and developing. For fifty years, verses have been shining like palace fountains, metaphors have been flying, like a flock of birds across all the world’s meridians, through clouds of grammars from past and future tenses. And they have been splashing the world with Ohrid waves; symbols, epithets and verbs have been flying towards the star-lit sky, towards the All-mighty, transforming into white foams, like the ones that created the marvelous Aphrodite. For the great world-known poetess from Cuba, Nancy Morejon, winner of the Golden Wreath, “Macedonia is a beautiful and interesting place. The mountains here are similar to those in the Caribbean, descending into the sea. There is no sea here, but the warmth of my welcome is something very special. I feel honored to be in Macedonia”.
There have always been songs about Struga. Even from the people’s genius. “Am I glad to have a store in Struga, to watch the girls from Struga…” There have been many songs about Struga by the world-known poets in more recent history. “Flow Drim, flow. Homer is calling for Rafael Alberti today, from high above, from Olympus” – sang Janis Gudelis from Greece, that year when I was in Struga for the first time.
And it was in that year of 1978 that Seamus Heaney, today a Nobel Prize and a Golden Wreath winner, was in Struga for the Struga Poetry Evenings. “During those days and nights in 1978, when we could hardly sober up during the Struga poetry festival, Rafael Alberti was “the honored one”. Hans Magnus Enzensberger was also there, unexpectedly, wearing a panama hat, as well as a Danish fortune teller from the avant-garde, peaking through a hole, with an eye as clear as the water and the coral bottom of the Ohrid Lake” – wrote the marvelous Irishman.
Yes, that was my impression when I saw Struga for the first time – that everything which was sublime, faced towards the sky, towards the eternal and the infinite, was gathered in Struga.
Struga is an old settlement, with proof of life since the Neolithic period. Its extraordinary setting enabled it to be part of the great path Via Egnatia, the connection between the two Roman empires. In ancient times the town was called Enhalon, which meant ‘eel’. A Latin proverb says “Name is omen”. Enhalon was Struga’s omen. From river Black Drim’s exit in the Ohrid Lake starts the eel’s longest trip that leads to the Sargasso Sea, where it breeds. In time, the name has changed, as well the trip conditions of the eel which lives in the depth of the sweet water, but travels far away in order to reproduce. That trip, glorified in many poems of poets that came to Struga, has already been obstructed by the building of many artificial lakes across the flow of river Drim. There is a wonderful documentary, shot immediately after the Drim dam, which talks about the despair of the eels, trapped in the grids on their “God’s” path.
Laces made of words in many world languages are knitted on the bridges in Struga, and the threads of verses are painted in the colors of the rainbow, that magical bridge between earth and sky, and are sent by literary boats all the way to Sargasso Sea, along the eel’s way. The eel is a predatory fish with a snake-shaped body, around 1.5 meters long, with a pointed head and tiny scales in the slimy skin. Its color is black and it lives in Ohrid Lake, in the rivers White Drim and Black Drim. When it is sexually mature it leaves the lake and travels do the Mexican bay, where it lays its larvae. After three years, the larvae reach the European mainland. The females continue downstream along the rivers in the mainland while the males remain in the sea, near the rivers’ outfall. The poetic sighs also travel along the eel’s path, like poetic letters about what was; what is; and what will be. Strange is the path of the song, much like the eel’s path: where it starts, where it stops and where it reaches. “From the Andes all the way to Macedonia, With a great horse, Hispanic made of stone, and stops in Struga, where the worlds speaks in the language of poetry” – as Bolivian Ruth Cardenas sang in 1994.
Struga – a riverbed
In some writings you will the word Struga meaning “hunting ground”. But if you ask writer Jovan Strezovski, longtime director of the Struga Poetry Evenings, he will tell you that it means “riverbed”.
Struga is inviting us with its mildness and gentleness, caressed by sun rays throughout the whole day. There are many churches in Struga and nearby as well as culture-historical monuments from ancient times. Valuable icons, painted between the 14th and 16th centuries, were found in the town church of Saint George. In Kalishta, near Struga, where many beautiful hotels have been built as the tourism progressed, is the church of The Most Holy Birth-giver to God from the 14th century. This is also the place of the cave churches of Saint Athanasius and Saint Peter from the 14th and the 16th century. The cave church of Saint Archangel Michael can be found in the village of Radozda, while in the village of Vishni is the church of The Holy Salvation from the 14th century.
The old bazar and the green market in Struga are a rare ethnological exhibit. Every time I am in Struga, I walk through the bazar with a special experience, and I always go to the green market. It is where tradition breathes and life brings some strange peace from past times.
More than 4000 masters of the word from around the world have participated at the Struga Poetry Evenings. In the heart of the town, next the poetry center is the Poet’s park. Every winner of the Golden Wreath plants a tree there. That is how the trees and books live together, complement each other. The trees’ crust becomes the books’ cover, while the memories of the poets live on.
The endemic garden in Draslajca
When I think of Struga, I also think of the early deceased writer Krste Chachanski. I met him many years ago. With few of his friends, writers and journalists, we were guests in his home in Draslajca. We sat under the shadows of the grapevine in his endemic garden, refined by the hands of the master of the word and prisoner of the dream. We drank hot, home-made brandy, washed ourselves with the cold water from a pump in the yard and we listened to the calm speech of the kind host in that shelter of harmony between creativity and life.
In Struga, the song of the water and the song of the poet become the same never-ending trip. Just like the endemic inhabitant of the lake waters, the eel, first and unique. Unrepeatable for itself, but eternal for its kind. A trip on an unknown path, but with a primeval need. A path of no return. All the way to the Pacific Ocean.
And just like Vincenzo Bianchi once sang: “Struga, a small center of the world, where all the poets come, just like the Three Kings, to bring you a small present, the breath of their soul…”
And when I think of Struga, my memory is eternal. The journal of my soul opens. There is no place like Struga.
Goce Ristovski
