Grandma's Secret Book by Perica Sardzoski

Grandma’s Secret Book

There she was, resting in the shade of the old vine tree in her garden, gazing peacefully at the surrounding peaks, as if she would silently announce some secret message to them all, proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. She was my mystery, my treasure chest, my long lost bond with Nature, as only my grandma would have known. She lived on the fringes of civilization in a village situated somewhere in the middle of the silvan wilderness of Macedonia, for the whole of her life, and for a long while I wandered if she could read at all, since every time I visited her, she would grab the Bible, and start telling me stories from it, not reading, but telling them while she restlessly turned over pages after pages, to reveal such a fantastic narrative to captivate my fancy, which I later learned to be quite different from what the Holy script actually contained. I always taught she must have learned the whole Bible by heart. She did learn a story by heart, but that was yet to be confirmed, as to which story it was, and how it reached her in the first place. That summer day, I decided to pay a sudden visit to her, and what I saw and learned from that moment onward, changed my life forever, making me wonder how great the power of folklore could be, as well as how much knowledge an untrained mind can contain, now knowing what my grandma has revealed to me. My admiration for this Secret Doctrine well preserved in our oral tradition has grown ever stronger that lead me to this moment in life when I decided to put it down in writing and tell my grandma’s story to the world, as she has learned it from her lineage. She was holding a piece of clay tablet in her hand that she took from under her vest, weeping softly like a child after a deceased parent, singing a song as if enchanted by both grief and some prophetic insight. I got a little closer to hear what she was singing about. As I learned later it was an old Macedonian song, which I found in the “Collection of

Macedonian and Bulgarian folk songs”, a book that I came across by accident, 1

while I was making a research on the Macedonian ancient heritage in our folklore. My grandma was obviously not aware of my presence, and she was half mumbling half singing the song, as she was caressing the small tablet, crying over her misfortunate life. She was among the last witnesses of her age to have lived through the Great War, and she had gone through a lot in her life, before she settled down in the village of Jedoarce, whose sole guardian she has become, a mission she considered as sacred as life itself. Baba Lena1, as I call my grandma, is a woman of a lovely personality, and a modest smile, and she loves to sing traditional Macedonian songs. Despite her turbulent life, in which she had lost many members of her family, she spent five years away from her baby daughter, lost her husband, and reunited again, and moved from country to country, in instability and fear, arriving to this second home of hers, in Macedonia, where she lives now, never to go back to her native village again. She still loves to talk about it a lot, the games she played as a child in the village, the smell of the fields in summer. The look on her face told me that she was remembering all of that, as she was singing the mysterious lyrics. It goes like this:

“Hey Old Mountain, who will now guide our army across you, when we do not have a proud Tsar like the Tsar Caranus…”2 She has a vivid memory of the events from the time when she was very young, and she loves to talk about it so much that it would be ungrateful not to record any of it.

The story of Baba Lena is a witness account on true events, adapted to the narrative of this book.

From “The Collection of Macedonian and Bulgarian folk songs” from 1909 -1910 (according to Mihajlo Georgievski: “Slavic manuscripts in Macedonia, Skopje, 1988, p. 161-173”). On page 68, there is a song where the ancient-Macedonian Tsar Caranus is mentioned. Although the song has been recorded in Bulgarian, it is more than clear according to content that it is a Macedonian song. There were 28 other lines following the above mentioned. A Macedonian folk song about the Tsar Caranus was mentioned by the Macedonian author Isaija Mazovski in his “Memoirs” (Sophia 1922). He mentions that on 23.02.1867, he had visited the village of Sosalija (Enidze, Vardar) and his relatives, the brothers Hadzi-Sekovi. That evening, a Jew merchant was their guest too, who came to purchase wool from them. After concluding all business, they set down to feast and sing Macedonian songs! Then the brothers sang several very old songs, about the Macedonian king Caranus and Soluna the girl! In regards to this, Mazovski writes:

“Hearing the songs, the Jew in sheer surprise asked them how could these songs be preserved since such an ancient time! The brothers Hadzi-Sekovi told him that these songs were preserved since ancient times, and were passed on from father to son through generations. ‘These were songs of our fathers and grandfathers that is how we learned to sing them too’.” (Quote by Gane Todorovski: Veda Slovena, Skopje, 1979, p.30).

Sometimes we sit together, sing songs (she has a beautiful voice, just like Toše3, maybe because she was born on the same date as him), and talk about those dreadful times, when, as she puts it, Hell was on Earth. She was born in the village of Strkovo (Plati in Greek), on the 25 January 1923, in what is today Greece, Aegean Macedonia. Her father’s name was Trajko (Evstratios in Greek), and her mother’s name was Tronda (Triendaphilia in Greek). She doesn’t fully remember when they introduced the Greek names, since she was very young. It must have been somewhat between 1926-1928. She surely knows that her grandparents could speak no Greek whatsoever; they spoke Macedonian only, as Baba Lena witnesses. Her father, besides Macedonian spoke Greek too, and her mom didn’t know the foreign language. However, at school they learned in Greek, and spoke Greek in public with others, but when with friends and family they spoke Macedonian as well. It wasn’t easy for the children, Baba Lena remembers, because it was a foreign language for them as well as their parents. They could have forgotten the mother tongue and learned the Greek language easily, but there was a problem: the Macedonian traditional songs, they were so beautiful! And she loved to sing them in her mother tongue! She finished the sixth grade in primary school in 1935, and wanted to be educated in Lerin (Florina in Greek), but her family needed her in the fields, so they let only her older brother be the “learned” one, the rest were needed at the field. She recalls once, she felt so tired of working in the field that she decided to hide in the woods and sleep a while. Her family had been looking for her everywhere but they couldn’t find her. They must have freaked out! When she arrived at home that evening she got the cane so much that she has remembered it all her life. And she was never hiding again. In 1939, when she was only 16, she remembers the army came and mobilized the men from her village. It was a Greek army. There were rumors that, Italians might land in Albania and hit on the Greek border. On 28 October 1940 the event finally happened, and Italy occupied Albania and attacked Greece along the border, which was very close to Baba Lena’s village. It was a Monday, she recalls! So the Great War had begun! Baba Lena was in her teens. The next spring, on 15 April 1941 she heard from someone in the village, that the German Army was approaching the Prespa area, coming from Bulgaria. Greece had capitulated! Greece redrew from Albanian border. Italians came to Prespa! She remembers there were solders living in their house as well. Who knows how that felt for a teenage girl at the time! Her chastity might have been at stake! She married Grandpa Leko (Alexandros in Greek) in 1943 on 21 November. In the spring of 1944 the Germans came to the village, they went from house to house and didn’t do much harm to anyone. In 1945, she says, there was silence! 3

Tose Proeski (1981-2007), the most loved and talented pop-singer in Macedonia, and the Balkans, who died tragically in a car accident. He will be remembered as the Angel Voice of Macedonia.

In 1946 the Greek dictator Metaxa was elected president of Greece, and Baba Lena remembers that Macedonian language was totally ruled out of use. Until then they could speak, now and then, a bit of their mother tongue, but since this moment in history they were forbidden to use Macedonian at all. If caught they were taken to court and prosecuted, and imprisoned and beaten, sometimes to death. Just because of using their mother tongue! Outrageous!!! Many have suffered from spies and people who would frame the humble Macedonian villagers by alleging them to have spoken Macedonian. There were people sitting at the water springs in the centre of the village, recalls Baba Lena, watching over the villagers, who would come to fill water for their households, and eliciting them to say even a word in their own language. This was very common since our villagers were not educated, and could not speak Greek perfectly, so they would say a word in Macedonian sometimes, which was fatal to them! They would be taken to the court, prosecuted, imprisoned, beaten to death! How barbaric! How inhumane! The cradle of modern democracy has its foundations in cruel dictatorship and genocide! And this policy has prevailed throughout the democratic times of Greece, and even now in its European epoch, Greece does not do anything to soothe this shameful past; moreover, Greece is even fiercer in fighting against the Macedonian cause, and even more enthusiastic in telling the world lies about the Macedonians. They have long proclaimed us non-existent! I couldn’t disagree more having a living witness to the shameful deeds Greece had done, sitting here next to me, talking to me face to face! You know, those wrinkles on her face, tell the story on its own. Yet, Baba Lena amazes me with her spirit, and her caring smile, which haven’t faded at all throughout the years and the troubles she had. I am so grateful to have met her! The world should reexamine its values, or at least the source of them! Besides the dictator’s military forces there were bandits, raiding the poor villages, taking away food, clothes, cattle, harassing the population. Life was already becoming hell for Baba Lena, and the worst was yet to come. Things changed to better a bit in 1947. There was no school in that year. They removed all the old Greek teachers. The socialists had taken over, and there was a partisan movement spreading among the people. They started an Assembly, and in the village of German, they started a course in basic Macedonian. Baba Lena says they were just teaching the alphabet with poor literature, and it was going on for a couple of months only. It was their first school in Macedonian, at least since she was born. The times were so turbulent that she couldn’t have been happy about this, since her husband had to go with the partisans, and fight for the liberation of Macedonia and Greece from the dictatorship. It was 12 May 1947, in the small hours, he left with the partisans. He had to, because he was seen helping a wounded partisan earlier that spring, so if he didn’t leave, the Greek army would have arrested him and killed him in prison. That’s what they did.

Once, he was beaten - Baba Lena recalls - whipped with a belt, and brought home covered in blood. She cried a lot. After her husband left with the partisans, the fields were empty, says Baba Lena. We worked together in all the fields. It must have been very sad in those unstable times for her and her family. She had a baby daughter with her husband, that they called Ljuba (the loved one). It must have been very tough to go through all of that at young age with a child, and without a husband beside. In June 1947 the partisans liberated Prespa from the Greek occupation armies. There was not a single Greek official that remained. Their land had been liberated. For a short while. Then the planes started bombarding the villages in the area, every day, for a year or so, says Baba Lena. The planes were Greek, and Baba Lena remembers that the partisans were talking that the planes and bombs were given to Greece by England. England helped the Greek dictatorship!?! I wonder why? Well, if the Alliance had allowed Greece to be taken over by the socialists, it would have been a great loss for the Alliance’s force deployment at the Mediterranean. The Alliance sacrificed the Macedonian cause and people, to the greater benefit of the Great ones. Greece was lucky to be on their side. It was a battle of great powers. We were too small to be cared of. I wonder if there is justice in this world to at least acknowledge this outrageous act of historical and political “necessity”, which destroyed and completely disrupted the lives of many innocent Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia. The bombardment continued every day. The hills were burning, houses were destroyed, people killed. It was very risky to keep the children in the villages, so the partisan committee decided to send the children as refugees in other countries. The women were digging trenches and the men were fighting defensive battles. On 3 April 1948 they decided to take away the children. They took young Ljuba, Baba Lena’s firstborn. It must have been heartbreaking for both of them, as well as many other mothers. They could not have known where they would take them, and if they would live at all! They heard that they took the children in Resen, on Yugoslavian side. They placed them in a village called Ljubojno. They suffered from hunger then, Baba Lena recalls. The children were hungry, the parents under a siege. What a trap! They heard that the children were taken to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and her Ljuba was taken to Hungary. The men were drafted in the partisan movement. In 1948 the women were also drafted and the villages remained empty with only a few elders who could not fight. They were knitting socks for the partisans, or providing some food that remained in the storehouses. The villages became a waste land! Baba Lena became a partisan. She was given the role of a medic, assisting with the transportation of the wounded. She was stationed in Kalugjerica, then in Preol (Prespa), then in Vićoa Planina, Gamos (Epir), Lundzer, providing for the bunkers, the ambulances.

On 18 June 1949, they read in the newspaper that Tito had turned his back on them. The way out to Yugoslavia was closed. What a disappointment! Since this moment they had to take their wounded not to Macedonia in Yugoslavia, but to Albania instead. Baba Lena had gone through some battles, such as: 29 December 1948 in Crnoishte, 12 February 1949 they attacked on Lerin (Florina in Greek), and on 17 April 1949 they liberated the village of Sorovich (Amindeo in Greek). When she was in Lundzer, they were throwing barrels filled with petrol on them. The hills were on fire. It was burning like in hell, Baba Lena recalls. Many had died. The Greek army was bombarding the area all the time. On 10 August 1949 the Greek army started the total cleansing by bombarding the villages and the area non-stop for three days. Baba Lena says that it had been a dreadful sight to look upon. Hills burning, houses devastated, bodies scattered, people covered in dirt and blood, wounded crying… During the day there were bombs, and at night the planes dropped nails to sabotage the movement of vehicles, if any. On 13 August that year, Baba Lena, together with those who survived, was given orders to redraw from the village of Smrdez, over the village of V’mbel (Moskohori in Greek) to the Albanian border. They had been walking down the slopes of a very rocky mountain, all night in pitch dark, when Baba Lena tumbled down the hill and woke up with her foot twisted backwards. Her bones broken, her leg swelling, with a battle going on downhill! There was fire all through the night, gunshots, detonations, trees burning… Her partisan friends didn’t leave her, risking their lives alongside hers. Three of them, her heroes that she would never forget and will always be grateful to for saving her life, Petkana Nechovska (now in Tetovo – her best friend), Filip Miovski (who now lives in Gostivar), and Vangelija Noachoska (who lived in Australia). These three young people, took her on their hands, swapping turns every now and then, moving through the frontline, on a rocky mountain, to bring her to a save shelter. What a heroic deed! – She claims through tears. In truth! They left her in a place with lots of wounded freedom-fighters. She was crying all night long. And the next day! The shooting would not stop. She didn’t know anyone there. She was terrified! There was a Greek partisan who, when she heard his voice and called his name, took her on a horse to a deserted but quiet place in the middle of nowhere. He told her that he would go back to find his company and return for her as soon as the battle calmed down. She was so happy to have heard his voice in that hell, but now, stranded in the middle of nowhere, she was even more scared. What if he wouldn’t return? What if he was killed? She didn’t know where she was? She could see fire burning alongside the border with Albania. She spent the night alone, in the middle of nowhere, looking at her home place burning in fire, with a broken and swollen leg, and a devastated life. She was crying for eternity. Luckily, the Greek partisan Taki, came with some food and with a prisoner. He took her on a horse and went to Albania. They came across some people. They went to Korcha and spent three days in the meadows, as refugees. They were lucky it was summer. Sleeping under the bare sky! After three days a truck came by to pick up the wounded.

Baba Lena left with the truck. She was put in a hospital for 7 days. And her foot was well taken care of, even though she still has a remnant of the time. After this she was taken to Elbasan in Albania, where she stayed until November 1949. They told her to get ready because they would leave. Where? She didn’t know! She was just taken like a bag, from a place to a place, alone, helpless. She had become very introvert at that time, she recalls. She wouldn’t talk to anyone; she would just stay alone and cry! They took her to Drach (Durres) on a ship; she didn’t know where they would go. She was going to explode, she says. Should she go or not?!? To be or not to be? The committee was telling orders, she was a village woman left on her own among strangers, without her family, lost, devastated, and now taken to a foreign country she didn’t know where. Are you familiar with the feeling? Not quite, I guess! She was merely 28 years old at that time. They arrived to a place called 250 by the partisans. There were more than 2000 wounded. There were burnt planes too. They were treated for the whole winter, food and basic care. In February 1950 they took her somewhere in Poland. When she heard that they were taking her to Poland she was happy, because she had heard that some of her family were there, so they might reunite. She had to go on a ship across the Gibraltar, illegally in the storage space, as a cargo. She recalls that some of the girls were given dresses to put on and act as the crew’s spouses, in front of the Border Control. They arrived in Poland and stayed in a small place in the mountains, for a short time. Then some people came and took her to Zgozelec, in Poland. She stayed there for some months. She took up a job in the orphanage. She reunited with her sister there, and she vividly recalls her first talk on a telephone with her sister. They were crying, kissing, and hugging each other, thanking God for the reunion. Her sister died later that year in Poland. She lost her again! Baba Lena was devastated then, even though she doesn’t show it now! They were dislocated again with all the children she was looking after to a place called Politze, in Poland. She stayed with the kids there! She hadn’t seen her daughter for 5 years. She was desperate! Then she was sent to a spa, and she received a false letter there, that her husband was in Zgozelec. She went there. It was a false call. Then in 1952, Zaharyadi came, who was the president of the Greek-Macedonian liberation movement. He talked to her and asked her where her husband was. She told him that she knew he was with the healthy army. She didn’t know where. He advised her how to find her husband and reunite with the child again. On 31 March 1952, the day when a partisan hero was hanged by the Greeks - Baba Lena couldn’t remember his name; she took her journey from Poland to Russia on a ship again. She traveled for 9 days, and arrived on a train in Russia on the 8 April 1952. Luckily she had her little Ljuba back, and now they had to find grandpa Leko. He was taken to the military school to SSSR, in Tashkent, today’s Uzbekistan. She didn’t know that at the time.

When they arrived in Tashkent, there were couples reuniting, men and women found each other again, joy and happiness… Baba Lena’s face was veiled in sadness once again - her husband was not there. She was not on the list! She arrived three days earlier, which she didn’t know at the time, and grandpa Leko didn’t know she was there waiting for him. She was put in a dirty room with only a blanket, to freeze through the night with her daughter in her arms, alone, stranded, devastated… For three days she mourned over her poor life, and prayed for the life of her daughter. Eventually, grandpa Leko came and took them to his place. He was wearing a uniform and he was very handsome, Baba Lena recalls. They were the happiest living creatures at that time on the whole of this world. Can you imagine the light in Baba Lena’s heart, when she was cooking the first dinner to her family after all that time and suffering they all went through? They lived in Tashkent from 1952 to 1971 and then they heard that the Socialistic Republic of Macedonia, through Yugoslavia, was offering the Macedonian refugees from the Greek civil war 1946-1949, housing and employment in some of the cities, among which Tetovo. They were selected for Tetovo. Another big change in her life! This time for better they hoped. And it was better then all the turmoil that she had been through in her life, she was finally among her own family. Even though she never recovered from her loss of the homeland, the family and friends she had there, she became a mother of many. She still loves to talk mostly about her childhood, sing songs from that time, because it was the only time of innocence that her life had offered to her, as far as she could remember. She moved to the village after grandpa Leko’s death, and she stayed there for most of the time. When the 2001 ethnic conflict in Macedonia threatened to revive the scenario of her youth, she was scared she would lose this home as well. Some of the Macedonian population was fiercely forced to leave the western region of Macedonia, because of constant threats from the Albanian gangs. She is now still not sure of what life can bring, and ever since Toše Proeski’s death, she believes it is our people’s destiny to suffer for the good of all. “We are the Sunshine of this World that is why we have it in our Hearts”, she says. So, mote it be. She was still drying her tears when she saw me coming. She jumped up like a little child and took me in her arms, taken by surprise with my unexpected visit. The clay tablet slipped down her lap on the ground. I picked it up. It was a small flat object with an inscription on both sides. My grandma took it in her palm and showed me the symbols. “It goes from right to left. There is a message in it. Can you see it”, she asked me daringly.

I gave it a second glance. To me it was just an inscription with unintelligible characters. It looked like this:

There was something strange about the tablet. It felt really strange, but I swear I could hear it conversing to me in a very strange, yet understandable language. My grandma showed me the letters, one by one, and if you read Cyrillic, you would be able to read the following message on the tablet:

SKRIJ SE S’G LO[I QUDI PS’NI KOI IWI IDU [IRE ID’T P’G

Transcribed this would sound like: SRIJ SE S’G,

SKRIJ SE SEGA

HIDE NOW

LOSHI LJUDI PS’NI

LO[I LU\E PSETA

PEOPLE BAD AS DOGS

KOI INJI IDU

KOI POINAKVI IDAT

WHO COME DISGUISED

[IRUM IDAT PAK...

ARE COMING AGAIN

SHIRE ID’T P’G…

The first is a transcription of the original text, read from right to left, after recognizing the Cyrillic letters that are so obvious that one would be surprised not to have seen them earlier – it was like looking at the inscription in the mirror, a bit twisted but still clear enough. The second text is a translation of the text into modern Macedonian, and the last is its English equivalent. I was shocked to hear this message coming from the clay tablet. I immediately asked where she got it from and how old it was. The tablet is from Gradeshnitsa4, she said, a village in Pirin Macedonia, and it was given to her by her grandma who came from that village. It was given to her along with the Bible that she had in her hand, that same old Bible wherefrom she was telling me about all the Tsars of Macedon, stories that have carved deep into my subconscious mind, that I later discovered to be very much true, to my own surprise, knowing the way my grandma had been conveying them, from shear fantasy, as it seemed to me at certain times. I later found out that the clay tablet, along with the inscription, belonged to the Vinča5 culture, which was an ancient Neolithic culture with a vast array of anthropomorphic figurines excavated, that revealed an interesting story to an outsider such as my grandma has raised me to be. I knew the inscription was ancient, but to contain a message that would sound intelligible to me, say 5000 years after it was first written - how plausible would that sound to a scholar of modern times? I thought it was another figment of my grandma’s imagination, but when I got a bit deeper into the matter I realized she might have been telling the truth. She said the message had been passed down to her by her grandma, following a lineage that was as ancient as time. There was more to it and I needed to know. My grandma then took the Bible, and told me that the clay tablet was the key to unlocking the hidden messages in the Bible. She had learned by heart all the stories she had heard from her grandma, and had been telling them to me ever since I was a child. This got me startled, and I 4

The inscription is a deciphered text of an old Macedonian -Vedic- song, found on clay plate at Gradeshnitsa, near Vraca, in Pirin Macedonia, of what is today North West Bulgaria. The clay plate, according to Marija Gimbutas, dates back to c.5000 BC. According to Bulgarian archaeologists, it dates back to c. 3500 BC.

The Vinča Culture derives its name from the village of Vinča, located on the banks of Danube, 14 km downstream from Belgrade (at the 1145th nautical kilometer), where one of the largest and most significant prehistoric Neolithic settlements in Eastern Europe was discovered in 1908 by a archaeological excavation team led by Miloje M. Vasić, the first schooled archeologist in Serbia.

The Neolithic settlers of Vinča ascribed great importance to spiritual life as is reflected by the enormous number of cult objects (figurines, sacrificial dishes, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic dishes). Their artistic and stylistic development was conditioned by the teachings of old settlers, as well as by contacts with neighboring peoples and their beliefs. Anthropomorphic figurines have a characteristic dignified stance and their number (over 1000 examples at Vinča alone) exceeds the total number of figurines discovered in the Greek Aegean. Shrines were discovered in Parṭa Transylvania with complex architectural designs. Some figurines and ceramic dishes discovered in the broad region spanning from Serbia, Kosovo-Metohija, Southern Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and northern Greece, bear signs which some scholars suppose to be primitive forms of writing (see Old European Script). Indeed, if the inscriptions on the Tǎrtǎria tablets are pictograms, as Vlassa argued, they would be the earliest known writing in the world. This claim however remains controversial; most experts consider the Tǎrtǎria finds to be an example of PROTO-WRITING rather than a full writing system.

didn’t know what to say. I felt again like a child gazing into her mysterious eyes, wondering about the treasures concealed within her heart, the Secret Book that she was reading from, the Living Bible of Light shining through her eyes, as she was weaving the threads one by one, giving way to the magical fabric of reality, as fantastic as it could only get. My grandma had learned a secret way to link the clay tablet with certain events in the Bible, which she learned about from inner sources, as passed on to her within her family since times long forgotten. She knew which places or events in the Bible the message from the tablet referred to. “Hide now, people bad as dogs, who come disguised, are coming again”, was a hint to all the events in the Bible associated to the periods when fate was not so favorable for our people. In this way my grandma would find it easier to tell the same story, as depicted in the Bible, but from another viewpoint, from the perspective of the oppressed, in a hidden way, since the invaders, or the bad people as she called them all, would never allow the indigenous to remember. They would rather have them forget who they were, and learn only the history of the oppressors. My grandma and all those before her, had learned a way to preserve the truth in a hidden way, using the lies they were served by the bad people who came again disguised like dogs to raid and ravage the land she was indigenous to. The land she called Macedonia – the Motherland. After I investigated all the stories my grandma had told me, I realized that there was a parallel history to that we have been taught in schools, known only to few, if any at all. Just as the coin has two sides, our story here reveals the rather Dark Side of the Moon, something that has been concealed and oppressed for a long while, but well-preserved in our oral tradition in a way that would make even the greatest skeptics shiver to the possibility of accepting this account as true. Therefore, I will start my story with a Manifesto addressing all those who have wholeheartedly set on a Quest for the Truth that has burned deep into their souls taking them as far as it can get. To all of you: It doesn't matter which name you chose - it matters what you represent with it! To me Macedonia is the land where the very soul of Mother Earth, springs up in torrents from the mountain peaks, and the steady sound of vastness of space lures you to a deep indulgence into your own Cosmos to discover the Truth. The Truth is one for all! To me Macedonia is the "bellybutton of the world" that connects me to Mother Earth! Macedonian to me means: Keeper of the Sun! It means Guardian of the Holy Grail of the House of Macedon; it means a fairy tale that might one day come true. To me Macedonia is an inspiration and an everlasting fountain of joy and happiness. Therefore we must preserve this light for the children to come, and thus liberate the souls of those entrapped by the darkness of ignorance.

I am Macedonian! And that is my birthright, and I am the son of my parents, and this is my culture, my people, my land that I call Macedonia! It is our music, our hospitality, our poignant destiny, our example to the world of the true values we have inherited and cherished all this time, regardless of the suffering we had to go through in order to preserve it. After all, we have to take the Cross and walk His way! In the name of the Lord above us, I proclaim myself a spiritual heir of the Macedonian legacy and I have something to show the world, regarding it. May the universe behold, there is a miracle at hand! And it bears the name of Macedon, and it has a shining star on its face! Let everything that is of the Dark hide away now, before it dissolves in the eternal Light of the flaming Truth within.