Stara caršija - 1955
ABOUT THE FILM : Stara caršija
Kinoteka na MakedonijaThe Old Bazaar
Year: 1955
The paved streets of the Old Skopje Bazaar are still deserted. For several centuries, they have been home to hundreds of shops and workshops where the bazaar's craftsmen work. Krste Mihov, for example, is a tanner: he sews his leather in front of Aco Petrovski's camera. We meet and equally observe a tailor, silversmith and coppersmith, all heirs of the precious know-how passed on from generation to generation. This documentary, restored in 2000, focuses on a typical element of Balkan culture: craftsmanship, and its trade within the bazaar.
Nationality: Macedonian
Length: 9' 46"
Genre: docudrama
Sound: sound
Original elements: black & white
Original language: Macedonian
A BRIEF HISTORY : Stara caršija
Aco Petrovski (1923-2001) is a famous Macedonian screenwriter and filmmaker. After World War II, when Macedonia was transformed into a federal republic of Yugoslavia under Tito (1892-1980), Petrovski became involved in rebuilding the identity of Macedonian cinema. As of 1952, he worked for Vardar Film, the only Macedonian production company. Between 1976 and 1985, he was to be the first head of the Cinematheque of Macedonia.
The documentary cinema of Aco Petrovski offers us unique testimony into the culture and traditions of post-war Macedonia. Its ethnological viewpoint clearly shows through Stara Carsija. Just as in Dervisi or Galicka Svadba, Petrovski strives to describe to us the customs of a people whose identity has often been waylaid.
"Carsija" designates, in the Balkans, the quarter of the city where economic activity during the Ottoman Empire was concentrated. Craftsmen's workshops and businesses are grouped together there, structuring the Bazaar by professions. The Skopje Bazaar had some 2,150 shops. Thanks to its geographic location, Skopje was, under the Ottoman Empire, a major administrative and economic centre: between today's Serbia, Bosnia and Albania to the north and west, and Bulgaria and Turkey to the east. Situated on the left bank of the Vardar, which crosses all of Macedonia, the Skopje Bazaar is one of the nerve centres of the Balkans.
Petrovski's images date from 1955, only a few years before the terrible earthquake which ravaged the city in 1963. They are testimony to Ottoman architecture and the practices of a place at the end of the World War II. If the reconstruction of the centre of Skopje strongly marked the evolution of the Bazaar, the latter remains today a place of life and cultural and architectural richness.
