Ederlezi
The song owes its name from Ederlezi, which is a Spring festival, celebrating the return of springtime especially by Romani people in the Balkans, and elsewhere around the world. Ederlezi is the Romani name for the Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian and Serbian Feast of Saint George. It is celebrated on 6 May [O.S. 23 April] (occurring approximately 40 days after the spring equinox). The various Balkan spellings (Herdeljez, Erdelezi) are variants of the Turkish Hıdırellez, a holiday signaling the beginning of spring, occurring on the same day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ederlezi_(song)
http://singtheworld.fr
Camélia Jordana (chant), les Glotte-Trotters (choeurs)
INSIDE THE MACEDONIAN FAKE-NEWS COMPLEX
by Samanth Subramanian | photographs by Guy Martin | © 2020 WIRED
The Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News
RELATED STORIES
THE FIRST ARTICLE about Donald Trump that Boris ever published described how, during a campaign rally in North Carolina, the candidate slapped a man in the audience for disagreeing with him. This never happened, of course. Boris had found the article somewhere online, and he needed to feed his webÂsite, Daily Interesting Things, so he appropriated the text, down to its last misÂbegotten comma. He posted the link on Facebook, seeding it within various groups devoted to American politics; to his astonishÂment, it was shared around 800 times. That monthâFebruary 2016âBoris made more than $150 off the Google ads on his website. Considering this to be the best possible use of his time, he stopped going to high school.
Boris isnât his real name. He prefers the anonymity because he doesnât want to break ranks with the other people in his town of Veles, in the Balkan nation of Macedonia. Nobody here wants to dwell on Trump anymore. Veles has the feel of a small community clamming up out of a suspicion that itâs being talked about for all the wrong reasons.
In the final weeks of the US presidential election, Veles attained a weird infamy in the most powerful nation on earth; stories in The Guardian and on BuzzFeed revealed that the Macedonian town of 55,000 was the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites, many of them filled with sensationalist, utterly fake news. (The imminent criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton was a popular theme; another was the popeâs approval of Trump.) The sitesâ ample traffic was rewarded handsomely by automated advertising engines, like Googleâs AdSense. An article in The New Yorker described how President Barack Obama himself spent a day in the final week of the campaign talking âalmost obsessivelyâ about Veles and its âdigital gold rush.â
- Secret Facebook Groups Are the Trump Eraâs Worst, Best Echo ChamberBY EMILY DREYFUSS
- The Bittersweet Sweepstakes to Build an AI That Destroys Fake NewsBY CADE METZ
- Meet the Ad Companies Ditching Breitbart and Fake NewsBY DAVEY ALBA
Within Veles itself, the young entrepreneurs behind these websites became subjects of tantalizing intrigue. Between August and November, Boris earned nearly $16,000 off his two pro-Trump websites. The average monthly salary in Macedonia is $371.
https://www.wired.com/video/inside-the-fake-news-factory-of-macedonia
Boris is 18 years old, a lean, slouching youth with gray eyes, hair mowed close to his skull, and the rudiments of a beard. When he isnât smoking a cigarette, heâs lighting one. He listens to a lot of gangsta rap: the Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, Wu-Tang Clan; after watching Notorious, the 2009 biopic of B.I.G., he decided he would like to visit Brooklyn, a New York City borough he imagines overrun more by gangsters than hipsters. He is an affable raconteur, with a droll sense of humor and a clear-eyed view of himself and his town. Someday he wants to leave Veles, because of how little there is to do. You can live with your parents and have them pay for your evenings in a bar, or you can bus tables in a cafĂ©. If youâre a gym rat, you might work security. A few factories on the outskirts of town still offer regular employment, but nothing lavish. âWe canât make money here with a real job,â Boris says. âThis Google AdSense work is not a real job.â
At best, Borisâ English is halting and fracturedâcertainly not good enough to turn out five to 10 articles about Trump and Clinton every day for weeks on end. Fortunately for him, the election summoned forth the energies of countless alt-right websites in the US, which manufactured white-label falsehoods disguised as news on an industrial scale. Across the spectrum of right-wing mediaâfrom Trumpâs own concise lies on Twitter to the organized prevarication of Breitbart News and NationalReport.netâideology beat back the truth. What Veles produced, though, was something more extreme still: an enterprise of cool, pure amorality, free not only of ideology but of any concern or feeling about the substance of the election. These Macedonians on Facebook didnât care if Trump won or lost the White House. They only wanted pocket money to pay for thingsâa car, watches, better cell phones, more drinks at the bar. This is the arrhythmic, disturbing heart of the affair: that the internet made it so simple for these young men to finance their material whims and that their actions helped deliver such momentous consequences.

‘We horen er eindelijk bij in Europa’
EK-poule Oranje compleet met debuterend Noord-MacedoniĂ« –
Het nationale voetbalteam van Noord-Macedonië schreef vanavond historie. Voor het eerst in de geschiedenis plaatste de ploeg zich voor het EK. En daarmee kent Nederland ook de derde tegenstander op het toernooi, want Noord-Macedonië komt bij Oranje in de poule. Met het al eerder geplaatste Oostenrijk en Oekraïne is de poule nu compleet.
NOS-Verslaggever Vlado Veljanoski is geboren en getogen in Noord-MacedoniĂ«. In Langs de Lijn En Omstreken noemt hij de prestatie van de ploeg wondermooi. “Ik kreeg een appje van mijn schoonmoeder. Zij zit al maanden opgesloten door corona, maar ze veerde helemaal op. En mijn zwager zei: ‘We horen er eindelijk bij in Europa’.”
Belangrijkste sportprestatie ooit
Noord-MacedoniĂ« plaatste zich door GeorgiĂ« te verslaan met 1-0. Het doelpunt werd gemaakt door de 37-jarige Goran Pandev, spits van Genoa in de Serie A en de grote man van de ploeg. “Hij was al een grootheid in het land, maar ik denk dat er nu in de hoofdstad Skopje wel een standbeeld van hem komt. Dit is heel bijzonder voor het land, misschien wel de belangrijkste sportprestatie ooit.”
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De vraag is natuurlijk wat voor shirtje Veljanoski aantrekt als Noord-MacedoniĂ« en Oranje elkaar treffen op het EK. “Daar ga ik geen uitspraken over doen. Maar vanavond slaap ik een Macedonische pyjama.”
June 2020 in Ohrid
In memory of Peter Steneker (1951-2019)
Month of crossings and changes
Den Doolaard died on June 26, 1994, in the Dutch village of Hoenderloo, where he lived the last 40 years of his life. He was entombed several days later and his eternal abode was marked only by a naturally shaped river stone.
We could acknowledge this tombstone simplicity as a sign of equality with the modesty of his living, but also as a counterbalance to the untamed greedy nature of his urge to attain the ideal of freedom. Equally, he embraced both personal and collective freedom as two closely related and interdependent values, just as he accepted cognition as an integral part of the process of liberation.
Can one attain the ideal of freedom without getting rid of the darkness of ignorance, prejudice, delusion, fear? In this regard, his departure from the Netherlands in 1928 and the pursuit of a wandering life should be seen as a sort of an “escape from the ugly concrete buildings of the West” and an attempt for a more comprehensive discovery of the invisible side behind the horizon.
Starting an ascension in the literary scene as from 1931 with his novel De druivenplukkers (The grape pickers), that was later followed by a dozen other successful publications in the Netherlands, in spite of his physical absence, A. den Doolaard remains one of the renowned Dutch writers of all time. He was also an athlete, an accountant, a freelancer, a hired labourer, a journalist, a photographer, a wanderer and, aboven all, a passionate Macedonia-lover. He had emphasised his commitment to Macedonia through his literary work, that he had long and widely expressed as his “second homeland.”
In doing so, well aware of all the contradictions and ambiguous renaming, he always called it by its historically given name: Macedonia!
In June 1931 he traveled to the Balkans for the first time, first to Belgrade, later he visited the south. After his first meeting with Lake Ohrid, Den Doolaard had repeatedly returned to the blue water that ripples between the high mountain ranges and a small city that was “een verrukkelijke mengeling van gebruiken en eeuwen”. A lovely mixture of traditions and centuries of customised existence, indeed. Wooden barges, quietly cutting the water, churches hiding on their dusty, cobweb-covered walls, medieval frescoes modern history was hardly aware of – the balanced and relaxed life of the locals. Plus an abundance of ancient tradition gave impulse to his legendary work for Ohrid.
The novel De bruiloft der zeven zigeuners (The wedding of the seven gypsies) was published almost 90 years ago, in the year 1939 it had several reprints. The interest in it in the Netherlands has not diminished at all. In the issue of June 6, 2019, the Dutch women’s weekly Libelle published an eight-page article entitled Magisch MacedoniĂ« inviting readers to visit Macedonia where the emphasis as expected is given to the Lake Ohrid region. Surely, no Dutch author will ever be able to write about the beauty of Macedonia without mentioning A. den Doolard and his famous novel on Ohrid. Also, publicist Karin Kuijpers begins her article with a reminder of the âfirst Dutch promoter of Macedonia” and De bruiloft der zeven zigeuners.
Obviously, the main reason for the continuing popularity of A. den Doolaard with the generations and in particular his novel about Ohrid, they are likely to be discovered in the intensified activities in the tourism branche. As A. den Doolaard himself had written, “mensen komen en gaan, maar hun gedachten blijven waaien rond de aardbol als een onzichtbare wind”.
Accordingly, his thoughts expressed in the novel about Ohrid, they continue to wave the spirits of his readers, prompting many new trips of the younger Dutch generations to the high Macedonian mountains, where Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa are shining in blue. The same lakes that in Den Doolaards early youth compellingly stared at him from his father’s atlas. Both attractive and seductive, as the eyes of his first pubertal love, whose eyes resembled the flower Myosotis.
Nevertheless, Macedonia and Ohrid in particular, they highly appreciated A. den Doolaard’s affection and he was honored with diversity: first a memorial in the Dutch Park in Ohrid, followed by translations, lectures, exhibitions …
On June 19, 2011, in the Cultural and Information Center “Cultura 365” in Ohrid, the exhibition “110 years since the birth of A. den Doolaardâ was opened. It remained there and took the form of a permanent museum exhibition; original editions of his books are on display here.
Hallo Macedonië
âEen verblijf in JoegoslaviĂ«,
en zeker een lang verblijf,
is een kaleidoscoop van aangename en onaangename verrassingen,
zoals trouwens het mensenleven zelf.â
MacedoniĂ«. De naam van deze jonge Balkannatie klinkt ons bijna mythisch in de oren, toch? Niemand minder dan Alexander de Grote schijnt er vandaan te komen, al scheiden zich daar vandaag de dag de Griekse en Zuid-Slavische geesten. âHoe komt men daar nou zo verzeild,â vraagt men mij met lichte ontzetting in de ogen, âen vooral nu, met Corona enzo?â Door A. den Doolaard, antwoord ik dan. Wat? Wie? Want wie was ook weer A. den Doolaard, die roemruchte, rondzwervende journalist/chroniqueur uit de vorige eeuw?
Voormalig enfant terrible der Nederlandse literatuur.
Op een druilerige novemberdag flaneer ik nieuwsgierig door het pittoreske Ohrid, gelegen aan de oevers van het diepste meer in Europa. Aan de horizon gloort een Albanees berglandschap. Een tweesprong doemt voor mij op. De weg voert langs een veertiende-eeuws kapelletje en dan naar beide zijden verontrustend stijl omhoog over kinderkopjes, richting het middeleeuwse stadscentrum.
Onrustig kijk ik om mij heen. Had ik niet toevallig net een kekke herberg over het hoofd gezien? Zo eentje, waar ik mijn plan om in de uren die volgen mij vooral in historische overleveringen te verdiepen en de bijbehorende bouwwerken te bezichtigen, nog eens bij een stevig glas bier en een neut lokale pruimenjenever (rakije), in alle rust kan overdenken? Eerder, in de nazomer, was ik al eens hier beland. Maar toen ietwat gehaast, slechts op doorreis in gezelschap van een kennis, vanuit Pristina, Kosovo komend. Via de Macedonische hoofdstad Skopje en op weg naar DĂŒrres aan de Albanese kust. Daar wachtte een reeds geboekte veerboot naar Bari, in de door mij zo geliefde Italiaanse provincie Puglia.
Ineens stond ik als aan de grond genageld. Achter de ramen van dat onooglijke winkeltje, het stond er toch echt:
Foto’s: A. Den Doolaard Museum – Ohrid; Noord-MacedoniĂ«