A Cultural Connector in Tetovo
In the town of Tetovo, at the foot of the Sharr Mountains in North Macedonia, languages from across the world resound around the local cultural centre, the venue of the Ditet e Naimit (Days of Naim) international poetry festival, named in honour of the 19th Albanian Renaissance poet Naim Frasheri.
Dominican, American, Italian, Austrian, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, Croat, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Macedonian poets recite their works, which are then rendered in Albanian by local actor Arsim Kaleci. Albanian poets perform too.
Addressing the audience, festival director and poet Shaip Emerllahu said poetry “affirms diversity as a common human asset”. The festival, he said, has become “a living bridge between cultures and hearts”.
Almost three decades since its founding, the poetry festival is a fixture of the arts scene in Tetovo, a predominantly Albanian-populated town in the west of North Macedonia, its previous prizewinners including New York poet and spoken word performer George Wallace and the late Albanian novelist and poet Ismail Kadare.
Advocacy Through Poetry
Struggle for Albanian Rights
In turbulent times, in a turbulent corner of the globe, poetry has long been at the centre of Emerllahu’s struggle to assert the rights of Albanians to enjoy their language and culture, across the former Yugoslavia and, more recently, in North Macedonia.
“We affirm our culture based on our traditions,” Emerllahu told BIRN. “Our goal is to make the state more harmonious.”
Repression and Conflict
When Emerllahu was born in Tetovo in 1962, North Macedonia was one of six Yugoslav republics. By the early 1980s, he was at university in Kosovo, then part of the Serbian republic and where Albanians were in the majority.
“It was a time of great demonstrations of many students who requested a state of Kosovo and protested against the discrimination the Albanians were facing,” he recalled. “Naturally, as a student, I also participated.”
As Albanians pressed their demands, Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic warned of a genocide unfolding against the Kosovo Serbs and in 1989 revoked Kosovo’s autonomy. As war raged elsewhere in the crumbling Yugoslav federation, a decade of state repression ensued in Kosovo, where Albanians were turfed out of public sector jobs, Albanian-language teaching driven underground.
Emerllahu drew from the experience to agitate for greater Albanian rights in newly independent Macedonia in the 1990s.
“We continued, with different methods, to make our contribution to the better position of Albanians, but I was mainly determined to contribute to the rise of cultural life in Macedonia,” he said. “My friends and I [Albanian intellectuals in North Macedonia] opened the Albanian Cultural Community, which tried to find solutions in many fields, especially in higher education.”
Unable to continue their studies in Kosovo, many Albanian students from North Macedonia returned home, but had nowhere to study.
So, in 1994, the Albanian Cultural Community opened the first Albanian University in North Macedonia, seated in Tetovo. The authorities in Skopje opposed the move, triggering protests and unrest. One protester died.
From Conflict to Cultural Triumph
Birth of the Festival
Emerllahu went into journalism and joined the Writers’ Association. In the mid-1990s, the association organised a small gathering of Albanian poets from across the region, an event that in 1998 became the Days of Naim international poetry festival, with Emerllahu its director.
Naim Frasheri is widely regarded as the Albanian national poet, a prominent figure in the Albanian National Awakening.
Image Source: Balkan Insight
Growth Amid Challenges
A funding dispute with the Writers’ Association prompted Emerllahu to register the festival separately.
“Year after year we improved and expanded,” he said. “We managed to show that we were serious about having a professional international festival, which would only benefit Albanian culture and North Macedonia.”
The festival survived months of clashes between government forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas in 2001, when tanks fired from Tetovo at rebel positions in the mountains. The country was dragged from the brink of full-blown civil war by a Western-brokered deal offering Albanians – roughly a third of the population – greater rights and representation, though implementation was slow.
Today, the festival has its own publishing house and has published around 100 books of the poets who have participated, as well as festival anthologies distributed for free to libraries and schools. Emerllahu, whose own poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, has built a library of some 5,000 books.