customs, verbs, and gligorov

Macedonian custom says that if you’re an unmarried man or woman and you’re at a large dinner party where chairs are packed all around a table, you must not sit at a corner. This will give you bad luck with marriage and prevent you from finding a husband or wife. No one could explain to me what the reasoning was behind it. I assume that if you’re married, the dangerous effects of corner sitting are blunted.

Unrelated: my mentor and the supervisor for my research, Prof. Victor Friedman, just had a Macedonian translation of his works published, including his dissertation The Grammatical Categories of the Macedonian Indicative, which in 1977 was the first book on the modern, standard Macedonian language to be published in the United States. The book was promoted with a presentation at the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, an old socialist-era building that manages to be surprisingly beautiful on the inside. The hall was packed with representatives of MAAS, professors from the university, students and colleagues of his, the media, and the government.

Among the government-related people attending was the first president of independent Macedonia, Kiro Gligorov. He successfully negotiated the withdrawal of the Yugoslav National Army from Macedonia, an extremely important accomplishment, as it kept Macedonia out of the horrific Yugoslav Wars that had ravaged Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. On their way out, the (at that point) mostly Serbian army stripped the country of all weapons and military hardware they could take. They went so far as to detach faucets and sinks for the scrap metal. This left Macedonia in an extremely vulnerable position (with Greece engaging in an illegal economic blockade). That the country made it through this period intact and without violence is a testament to his negotiating skill. He also survived an attempted assassination by carbomb that left him blind in one eye, killed his driver, and injured others. The perpetrators have not been discovered to this day.

So it was a great honor when Prof. Friedman introduced me to him at the presentation. We did nothing more than exchange greetings, but Prof. Friedman hopes to give me the opportunity to talk with him more at some later time. It would be an incredible opportunity.