“A Patriotic Act for Macedonia”: The Mnemohistory of Commemorations of Mara Buneva in Skopje (2001-2018)
Almost every year since 2001, on 13 January, a commemorative plaque dedicated to Mara Buneva is mounted and, on several occasions, demolished in the centre of Skopje. Buneva (1902-1928), who was affiliated with the rightist interwar Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (Vnatrešna Makedonska Revolucionerna Organizacija, VMRO), is famous for her assassination of Velimir Prelić (1883-1928), a high-ranking representative of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Kingdom SHS) on the territory of today’s North Macedonia, as well as her immediate suicide at the crime-scene. The present paper aims to trace the so-called mnemohistory of commemorations of Mara Buneva in Skopje by triangulating the historical and media discourses and political rhetoric over the commemorative events from 2001 to 2018. I argue that the discursive shift over Mara Buneva, as well as over the commemorations themselves, occurred after a set of groupist claims over a particular memory site.
2. How and why are commemorative events reimagined as platforms for pushing partisan agenda?
3. What are the critical shifts in the case of the commemorations of Mara Buneva in Skopje and when did they occur?
Naum Trajanovski
Naum Trajanovski is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was a project co-coordinator at the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (2017) and a researcher at the Faculty of Philosophy, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University – Skopje (2018-2020). His major academic interests include memory politics in North Macedonia and sociological knowledge-transfer in 1960s Eastern Europe.