SCENARIOS FOR RECONSTRUCTION OF MACEDONIAN VILLAGES

Minas Bakalchev, Violeta Bakalchev

This elaboration refers to a retrospective on the topic that was the framework of a series of projects, first for the final exam of the diploma and then for the master’s assignments worked in the period from 2006 to 2016 at the Faculty of Architecture, St. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Furthermore, the initiative continued in the individual projects, and all this has its own background from the 1990s, started with fellow enthusiasts, delighted and inspired by the rural environment that we found in Macedonia.

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Cities have been in constant focus in recent decades, they are in a constant dynamic of change, but the main consequences are not in themselves but in their background, in their environment, in the programmatic and spatial transformations and depopulation processes that cause them. However, villages, rural areas still have their authenticity. In our touch with them we can still reach the authentic place, such as identity, relationality and historicity. In facing those landscapes in a physical sense, in a tactile sense and indeed in a sensory sense, we can touch the original spectacles of nature. Those places still have that productive potential for development and can be a model for how people organize and survive in nature in an immediate way, to be a counterpoint to what is the modern “infinite city”.

Our subject of work through these studies is beyond the borders of Skopje and its periphery and moves towards the center and southern borders of our country in the area of Mariovo. Mariovo is a region with its own special exciting nature, geo-morphology, history, with a specific social and cultural heritage. At the same time, Mariovo in the 20th century is in constant decline. First, at the beginning of the 20th century, with the new geopolitical restructuring of the Balkans and cutting off the once integral vital flows, it became marginalized, and then, in the second half of the 20th century, with modernization and industrialization and concentration in urban centers, it became more and more abandoned. In it, we can immediately follow the dynamics of intensive depopulation of an area. From 12,000 inhabitants, in the second half of the 20th century, to 800 inhabitants, at the beginning of the 21st century and an unknown number of inhabitants today.

The project Scenarios for the Reconstruction of Macedonian Villages wanted to arrive at certain conceptual views on the issues of villages and their reconstruction. He proposed a series of tactics as an alternative to formal policies and dominant strategies for rural reconstruction. For this discussion, several illustrative examples have been selected, from the poetic approaches to the tactics of temporary recolonization in the case of the village of Shtavica (Aleksandra Shekutkovska), through the in-depth typomorphological analysis and subrural settlement in the case of the village of Vitolishte (Snezana Galovska), to the procedure of “ the amazement” of the houses from the village of Štavica (Ivana Bandevska).

In the case of the village of Vitolishte, after the rigorous analysis of the built texture, two approaches are offered. First, a tactic of sub-rural upgrading of the village, filling the village periphery with rural prototypes as a kind of spatial and programmatic transposition of the old houses. The houses are differentiated into two principal zones, the margin as a service zone and the main contents as an internal zone. Second, a kind of tactic of “acupuncture” intervention, injection, of new vertical structures, i.e. injection of a new program (temporary housing/inn), like brick towers, into the texture of the village. The summary picture is an extreme scenario for Vitolishte 2020, consisting of sub-rural islands and vertical structures. Then the threshold was 2020, today this scene represents an alternative history. Snezhana сл. 4 / Traces of 15 houses in various stages of decay. The village of Shtavica. Ivana Bandevska

2007 сл. 5 / The new panorama of the village of Shtavica

Galovska’s idea in 2007, for the stage of Vitolishte in 2020, was to provoke, to arouse interest in a possible future. Today in 2020, we are in a state of pandemic with an unchanged panorama of the collapsing village of Vitolishte.

When we talk about Mariovo, we are talking about the Prilep branch of Mariovo, which does not include a local road that goes from Prilep to Vitolishte. We worked mainly on this branch, and here are the bunch of villages, Shtavica, Chanishte, Manastir and Vitolishte.

The village of Shtavica is on the threshold of Mariovo. If we follow the demography from 1900 until the beginning of the 21st century, we will see the dynamics of the number of inhabitants. The year 1900 begins with 300 inhabitants, the 1960s reaches 500 inhabitants, the year 2002 the number of inhabitants is 84, today the situation is surely even more critical. On this occasion, we wanted to talk about the village of Štavica through the model of the house, that is, the tactics of characters and functions of the houses. This village was also used as a background in Milcho Mancevski’s film “Before the rain”. It is exactly the scene when the main hero Alexander Kirkov returns to the village, in front of the courtyard gate. The house no longer has windows, only openings. He sleeps in that room, and the next day there are children at the window who are attracted by his presence in that house, the presence of the stranger in the village. We wanted to propose a way of intervention through the house, through that model of an abandoned house and a returnee to the village.

The village of Shtavica consists of a loose aggregation of houses on slopes that descend towards the river. We analyzed the houses in terms of their construction condition and singled out the abandoned houses that are in different stages of destruction. Contrary to their critical condition, precisely those “weak” places of the village are the positions for possible future interventions. Their traces are the basis for the development of the project. The idea was not to reconstruct the old, ruined houses and return them to their original state, but to give rise to a new form of the houses as a morphological and symbolic decontextualization that starts from a new reading of their in-depth structure. We wanted to see the houses in a new different way. As in Viktor Shkolovski’s literary procedure of astonishment, looking at the existing in a different way, “defamiliarizing” or “estrangement”, the houses are removed from their commonness and at the level of the village they become a kind of new landmarks, monuments, on the landscape of the village.

The thus selected houses and their building plots are the basis for the new intervention, whereby the new intervention is reduced from 2/3 to 1/3 of the area (m2) of the existing building plot while maintaining the assumed volume value (m3). In this way, with a reduced base and the same value of the volume, the new figures of the houses are obtained as new intriguing phenomena in the village.

What about program structure?

It does not only refer to housing, but also to an additional program, program plus. Housing is represented by 2/3, and the plus program by 1/3. It is through the additional program that the specific profile/function of the house will be given.

What is that function and who are those characters/characters in the houses?

These are the pillars of a community, a teacher, a doctor, a priest, an architect, a baker, etc. In the project, Ivana Bandovska focused on four cases, resulting from the survey of volunteers with certain professions and their households. Through those specific cases, the spatial organization and program distribution of the houses could be constructed. In one of the houses in the village, we have a teacher with a small classroom on the ground floor, on the floor/gallery a space for work (library), above are the living spaces. The envelope, the covering of the buildings, is made of stone cladding, from the material of the old houses, which was found on the site. The doctor’s house consists of an office on the ground floor, with a separate entrance for the residential part, which is developed on the floors, and which usually ended with the living space, i.e. kitchen, dining room, living room, as the most representative part on the top level. In the architect’s house, we have an inversion, the working part, the studio is on the top level, the living part is in the lower levels. In that way, the spatial structure and program distribution acquire a practical as well as a symbolic meaning.

But who are really the people who will inhabit the village?

They may of course be local residents, but they may also come from a global background, from the farthest corners of the world. Practically as in the morphology of Viktor Propp’s stories, in which it indicates the ambivalence of the relationship between the character and its function, where it is important for the structure of the stories that the functions are permanent, invariable, and the characters are changeable. In that sense, the functions should be preserved, and the characters can be changed. They can be from Macedonia, from the world, and they can be on a temporary basis, for a certain time. That way we will have changing characters and permanent functions that will maintain and generate life in the village.

сл. 7 / Residents or former residents of the village participating in the project сл. 8 / The project for the church of St. Ilija, Govrlevo village: Minas Bakalchev, Mitko Hadji Pulja, Violeta Bakalchev, Sasha Tasic, Nikola Strezovski

Other experiences from the rural context

Our experience in relation to rural contexts, for example with the village of Govrlevo and the church of St. Ilia, builds on this topic. With this project, we are in the outskirts of Skopje, on the southern side of Vodno. It is a long-term, decades-long project.

After St. Ilia, 2008, we turned off the paved road and along the winding dirt road we reached the meadow and the church of St. Ilia, this exciting adventure began for us. It was our kind of discovery of the place of the monastery of St. Ilia and the first meeting with the inhabitants of the village. The project started with an honest conversation about their vision with Gotse, the chairman of the church board, from the village of Govrlevo. The project had to communicate both with the residents and with the church authorities who had to approve it.

Since then, we have been following the construction progress every year. At one stage, the foundations of both churches existed, the existing and the new, so the existing figure is covered by the new one. In the winter of 2009, the body of the building was already erected. On the day of St. Ilia at 2009, the dome was also erected. On St. Elijah 2010 I already have the figure of the church. It is the background and in the foreground of the meadow, there are people caught in a dance, celebrating the great holiday of Ilinden. Every Ilinden, the church was replenished with something. To date, many things have been completed, but there are also things that need to be completed. The interior is already closed with windows, the portal is lined with white marble slabs, gray plaster from Prilep is installed and the floor is in a “polychrome” mosaic structure. And half a year ago, the church got the wooden gate. Many people participated in this project, and the place itself became the backdrop for the residents’ gatherings on various occasions. Although he may not have rebuilt the village in a concrete sense, every Ilinden, he reunited the people of the village and their friends from all over the world.

We would like to show another project in a village context. This project is in the village of Velmej, from the famous Debarca. It’s about a yard. The owner did not want a house, he wanted a yard as a frame of his presence in the village. We started from an inverse archaeology, as a rediscovery of a possible peristyle, a hypothetical peristyle, which will give a new meaning to that place, on the border of the village and the field. First, the circular water gap is inscribed, in the center of the courtyard. Water ditches, like water marks, are present in the old country yards in Velmey. In this case he was describing the imaginary axis mundi of this place. Then we made a frame, a colonnade, composed of prefabricated concrete columns, “ready-made” elements, produced in the Karposh factory, the former production platform for the post-earthquake reconstruction of Skopje. In that way, this country yard stood out from the surroundings but at the same time framed the surrounding landscape. At the bottom of the yard is a covered porch with a series of auxiliary buildings as supporting spaces for the activities in the yard. They are covered in travertine. The village of Velmej is famous for travertine with its specific colors, light and dark. The project was realized as a continuous activity in spring-summer 2011.

A small church from the 12th century is located in the immediate vicinity of this site in the field. Thus, on certain occasions, the yard became a gathering place for all the residents of the village. We often visited the courtyard with our students, after returning from the field teaching in Ohrid. Here on the border between the field and the village, between the long shadows of the pillars that outlined the yard, we experienced incredible sunsets.

Finally, let’s mention the tap that we “discovered” in Velmey. A monumental move, which has a utilitarian application but also its solemn appearance. This fountain was reconstructed by professor Zivko Popovski in 1997. It points to the deep experience and original wisdom, but also the importance of the interpretation of everyday things and their refinement.

The work in the villages is really inspiring and stimulating, but there should also be people who will see it, understand it and do it, who will contribute to the various aspects of the reconstruction. As our friend Goce Adji Mitrevski used to say, it is a continuous workshop for repairs, corrections and nurturing our environment.