The City of Solidarity's Diverse Legacies: A Framework for Interpreting the Local Memory of the 1963 Skopje Earthquake and the Post-earthquake Urban Reconstruction

Parallel to the preparations for the urban reconstruction project, the Yugoslav authorities immediately endorsed the international support the city of Skopje received after the earthquake. On a central level, it was certainly Tito who most exploited “the political power of a symbol he himself had created that guaranteed Skopje a future.”⁽¹²⁾ The main platforms for communicating the Yugoslav narrative of post-earthquake Skopje as a symbol of international solidarity included the already established networks of the Nonaligned Movement (of which Yugoslavia was a founding member), the UN (of which, again, Yugoslavia was a founding member and an original signatory of the UN Charter at the UN Conference on International Organizations), and the reinvented relations with the Eastern Bloc in the wake of Stalin's death.⁽¹³⁾ Ernest Weissmann, an architect of Croat origins and UN officer on the Economic and Social Council, was especially significant in these regards. Weismann was one of the key figures entrusted by both the Yugoslav government and the UN to steer the Skopje reconstruction process. Like the UN, he pushed for reestablishing Skopje as an epitome of a city that promotes peace, understanding, and collaboration in the midst of the Cold War. All of the above actors drew the critical context of this multileveled, cross-sectorial, and transnational endeavor.⁽¹⁴⁾ In turn, the immediate post-earthquake support to Skopje became a reference point for humanitarian interventions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.⁽¹⁵⁾

As major memory agents in the local constellation, the local Skopje authorities were initially focused on promoting intra-Yugoslav solidarity in the aftermath of the earthquake; in late June, for instance, the Skopje City Council praised an initiative establishing a monument to the city's “brotherhood and unity.”⁽¹⁶⁾ However, daily bulletins reporting on urban reconstruction made it obvious prior to the first anniversary of July 26, 1964, that this primarily domestic-oriented slogan insufficiently depicted international support to the city. The set of activities that took place on July 26, 1964, to a large extent shaped the coordinates of annual earthquake commemorations for the upcoming two decades: a discursive linkage between commemorating the deceased and praising post-earthquake support to the city. The first aspect was related to the physical site of the Butel Cemetery in Skopje. In mid-July 1964, the city council had already issued a draft invoice to the Skopje reconstruction special fund for the arrangement of the graves of the deceased.⁽¹⁷⁾ A commemorative assembly of the Skopje City Council passed a special resolution on July 26, 1964, that elevated the site to a higher level of institutional protection by listing the Alley of the Victims of the Skopje Earthquake as a Spomen groblje [memorial cemetery].⁽¹⁸⁾ The council held several meetings dedicated to the necropolis from June to December 1964, while its definite scenery was finalized in 1965 with the installation of Georgi Gruin's monument “26 July,” a massive béton brut edifice typical of the Yugoslav memorial architecture and sculpture of the day, at the memorial site.⁽¹⁹⁾

The other set of commemorative activities held in July 1964 was designed to honor the international presence in the city in the tragedy's wake. In the words of Blagoj Popov, the then-equivalent of a Skopje city mayor, issued on the occasion of the international premiere of Veljko Bulajić's Skoplje ’63 at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival: “Skopje's earthquake was not just a mere tragedy, [but] something much more than that.”⁽²⁰⁾ This reasoning would translate into an official endorsement of the role of Tito, the UN's General Secretary, and the “Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, all the groups and individuals from abroad” in Skopje's reconstruction at the commemorative assembly on July 26, 1964. Thus as of 1964, the annual commemoration of the 1963 earthquake evolved into a platform for awarding the various stakeholders active in the urban reconstruction and promoting the benchmarks of the reconstruction project. At the 1965 commemoration, for instance, a UN-organized international jury announced the winners of the design contest for Skopje's central area, while the city council recognized approximately 150 organizations from all around the globe. This agenda would last up until the end of this commemorative period: major commemorative event in 1978 was the inauguration of the Treska Lake Complex in Skopje; in 1980, the inauguration of the new building of the Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology; and in 1981, the new object of Skopje's Transportation Center.

Halfway through the completion of the urban reconstruction project, the Yugoslav authorities established July 26 as a Dan solidarnosti [solidarity day], an initiative publicized in the early 1970s and made official in October 1973, thus further exploiting the symbolic capital of the solidarity trope to reinvent the state's disaster management politics. Dwelling on the “positive example of Skopje” and the 1969 Banja Luka earthquake, the legal project envisioned a special Fond solidarnosti [Solidarity Fund] that would account for up to 0.2% of the annual state budget with the single aim of supporting the post-natural-disaster recovery of the Yugoslav regions. The city of Skopje backed the initiative by acting as its informal capital and a “symbol of the strongly manifested solidarity.”⁽²¹⁾ The legal project also envisioned a so-called Solidarity Week with a fixed annual starting date of July 26 as a federal fundraising platform for auctioning solidarity-related memorabilia, such as special postage stamps. Therefore, as of 1973, the Skopje-based commemorations of the 1963 earthquake have often been portrayed as segments of the federal Solidarity Week in the Macedonian media. In 1976, the July 26 commemorations took place just days after disastrous flooding in the neighboring town of Kumanovo and an earthquake in Tolomin, Slovenia, two events that set the commemorative tone back in Skopje by increasing emphasis on the Yugoslav solidarity. In a similar vein, the catastrophic 1979 earthquake in Montenegro shifted the commemorative focus in Skopje from the 1963 tragedy to the post-earthquake solidarity in Skopje and the Yugoslav solidarity with Montenegrins.

A major illustration of the celebratory and “prospectivist” tones in the commemorations of the 1963 Skopje earthquake during the first two post-earthquake decades is the festival titled Sredbi na solidarnosta [Solidarity meetings], or SM.⁽²²⁾ On May 18, 1964, a Skopje City Council decree officially established the SM as an annual, week-long festival of noncompetitive cultural and sportive events to take place in Skopje from July 26 to August 2. The festival's end date was chosen on purpose by the organizational committee because August 2 was also the date of the Orthodox Christian holiday honoring St. Elijah, as well as the most prominent national holiday in post-war Macedonia: Republic Day, or Ilinden.⁽²³⁾ Each SM was organized by a special institutional body, the Organizational Committee of SM, which counted 22 board members overseeing the work of nine subcommittees.⁽²⁴⁾ The Organizational Committee also published an annual, multilingual summary of the festival, which listed all events and participants and provided a brief history of the city of Skopje and reports from the President of the Board and the Organizational Committee. As per Skopje's City Council, the SM had a threefold goal: to perform (or “manifest anew”) international solidarity for the city of Skopje, to promote Yugoslav sports and culture, and, finally, to show that “even though the city was struck by a deadly elementary force, it aims and aspires to live and conduct its everyday activities throughout these difficult conditions.”⁽²⁵⁾ Even though the organizers were not always able to provide suitable lodging because of Skopje's situation on the ground, the number of participants in the sportive and cultural events has yet to be matched even today: the first SM counted 1,509 participants in the sport segment alone, comprising 618 Yugoslavs, 147 locals, and 529 foreigners, as well as 32 media teams with over 215 members. The program was expanded the next year, not only to host a higher number of participants, but also to include three exhibitions and activities on “four major sites and several smaller ones.”⁽²⁶⁾

If the late 1960s and 1970s in Skopje were marked by rapid urban buildup, the 1980s and 1990s were marked by the official halt of the reconstruction project, the deterioration of the interethnic relations in the city and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Coming as a shock to the consumerist culture nurtured by the Yugoslav authorities, the late 1970s economic crisis resulted in inflation that rose to 75% per annum, while the living standards in Yugoslavia fell by 34% from 1979 to 1984.⁽²⁷⁾ The economic crisis also translated into termination of the state funding of Fond za obnova i izgradba na Skopje [Fund for Renewal and Reconstruction of Skopje], the major state-body overseeing the funding and responsible for Skopje's post-earthquake reconstruction, while the subsequent Operative Program ceased to exist in 1982. Moreover, the Socialist Republic of Macedonia was one of the Yugoslav federal units that was hit hardest by the economic turn of events. The 1980s, in the words of Jančeva and Litovski, saw the “culmination of [the state's] economic backwardness,” with average salaries in Macedonia 30.6% lower than the Yugoslav average in 1986.⁽²⁸⁾ In parallel, interethnic tensions in Macedonia reached a boil as of the early 1980s. Slobodan Milošević's rise to power and the 1981 riots in Kosovo were followed by Albanian riots in Macedonia which, in turn, provoked harsh responses by the state authorities throughout the course of the 1980s: the closure of more than 25 high schools in predominantly Albanian-populated settlements in Macedonia, prohibition of the usage of Albanian names in public spaces or giving Albanian names to newborn children.⁽²⁹⁾ The rationale behind these measures was the allegedly emerging “Albanian nationalism and irredentism” in the state.⁽³⁰⁾

Notwithstanding, international solidarity as established in the first commemorative phase remained a dominant discursive frame for commemorating the 1963 Skopje earthquake after the reinstallation of Lazar Koliševski and his pro-centralization team in power in socialist Macedonia in the late 1970s and, especially, after Tito's death in 1981. However, the situation on the ground provided space for altering public narratives about the earthquake and post-earthquake reconstruction. The official inauguration of the Transportation Center is illustrative of the general tone that marked the commemorations of the 1980s. The media event of the day was attended by the “highest members” of the establishment and a relatively large crowd of, as depicted by the media, “thousands of people.”⁽³¹⁾ The crowd was “impatiently” waiting for the arrival of the first-ever train at the new station, one of the “largest” and “most modern” in the region, from the city of Niš, Serbia, which showed up 30 minutes late.⁽³²⁾ The newspaper accounts also noted that the train operator was given a fresh bouquet of flowers and, in the margins, marked that the station was open to the public even though not completely finished; almost 3,000 of the 10,000 square meter total projected area of the station was yet to be completed, as were five out of the ten train platforms. One possible reason for this might have been the authorities’ awareness of the nearing end of the reconstruction program, which prompted them to rush to finalize capital undertakings designed in the post-earthquake years. The increased focus on the capital objects, in turn, shifted the agenda away from the “softer” events related to the earthquake; the SM, for instance, ceased to exist in its initial format after its ninth edition in 1973, even though it translated to a different set of festivals and activities, while instead the city lost interest in organizing large-scale international events and the hosting of the 20th Chess Olympiad in 1972, the IFC Canoe Slalom World Championship in 1975, and the 1981 World Wrestling Championship.⁽³³⁾

I identify two commemorative trajectories of the 1980s and 1990s: one molded around the progress made during the two decades post-earthquake, and the other consisting of various attempts to cast the same period in a different light. The first trajectory was predominantly promoted by the establishment and had Yugoslav solidarity and especially Tito as the agents most accountable for Skopje's post-earthquake breakthrough. The 1983 commemoration of the 1963 Skopje earthquake, its 20th anniversary, is particularly interesting in these regards: the major commemorative ceremony organized by the Skopje City Council took place a day before July 26, was attended by 840 domestic and foreign guests, and was principally reported to be a meeting wherein the delegates decided to rename the Youth Sports Center in Skopje as Park na solidarnosta [Park of Solidarity] and to select the members of Skopje's official delegation to Tito's grave in Belgrade.⁽³⁴⁾ Furthermore, the Macedonian media outlets of the 1980s were particularly focused on providing qualitative overviews of the benchmarks achieved by the urban reconstruction: carefully counting not only the new edifices and urbanized neighborhoods, but also the kilometers of water supply, sewage, and postal and electrical networks—a discourse often accompanied by a visual narration of the new edifices juxtaposed with photographs from the earthquake's immediate aftermath.

The most significant alteration in the mid-1980s’ commemorative trajectory was the emergence of a public discourse that collocated pre-earthquake Skopje—its architectural and urban features, everyday life, and cultural history—to the end results of the post-earthquake reconstruction. This discourse made room for an alternative narration of the city's reconstruction, one that did not emphasize the major benchmarks of the post-earthquake buildout and thus avoid the predominantly celebratory commemorative tone in public and media discourse. This tendency gained even more traction after the revision of Skopje's general urban plan in 1985 and changes to the post-earthquake planning model. The research project on Skopje's “constructing legacies,” sponsored by the Skopje City Council in the 1980s, illustrates the involvement of state institutions. The project's authors were critical of the “modernist and functionalist” planning and called for a reconsideration of the “traditional city and the constructing legacies.”⁽³⁵⁾ This discourse evolved over the next decade and was picked up by other formal and informal actors besides the state. Therefore, the Yugoslav dissolution and the Macedonian independence at the turn of the decade do not present a particular juncture in the commemorative domains of the 1963 Skopje earthquake. Moreover, the departure from the “brotherhood and unity” ideology further facilitated the process of re-narrating the history of post-earthquake solidarity in Skopje.

The 1993 commemoration of July 26, its 40th anniversary, best illustrates the two aforementioned trajectories. The daily newspaper Večer covered the event by presenting two complementary stories on the front page, featuring the authors of two recently published books on Skopje: Kole Jordanovski and Blagoja Ilievski-Marko. Both authors criticized various aspects of the post-earthquake urban planning policies in the city; Jordanovski, an architect himself and former director of Direkcija za obnova i izgradba na Skopje [Management of the renewal and reconstruction of Skopje], highlighted three “problematic” points of the urban reconstruction (the “uncontrolled mechanical influx” to Skopje; the failure to bridge the economic, social, and cultural gaps in the city; and the “hasty decisions” to demolish the capital objects in the city center). Ilievski-Marko weighted in that “he himself, as well as his peers” could not accept the new image of Skopje. On a separate note, the commemorative event with the highest attendance that year was the “Nezaborav na ‘63” [Never to be forgotten ‘63] festival, organized by the Red Cross of Macedonia and the radio station Kanal 2000. The event took place at the Treska Lake Complex, one of the urban reconstruction's last capital projects, and was attended by more than 1,000 citizens. The festival featured “a short demonstration of a water rescue operation and a swimming competition.” The event was also promoted as a token of solidarity in the midst of the Yugoslav wars, with the blood donation drive benefiting Bosnian-Herzegovinian refugees in the state.⁽³⁶⁾

Besides at the 1993 event, however, there were no structured commemorative narratives in the 1990s regarding the earthquake and post-earthquake reconstruction. The scarce media references to the earthquake frequently exposed the ontological insecurity of the Macedonian citizens and their general disappointment with their immediate sociopolitical realities. Vladislav Karanfilski, a journalist and an author, argued that “since we live in irregularly difficult times,” the city of Skopje should be declared “a city of international solidarity, an open and peaceful city” to “further protect the city from eventual ground attacks and air raids.”⁽³⁷⁾ A brief account in a 1993 issue of the major newspaper Nova Makedonija listed several of the festivals that succeeded the SM before the conclusion: “the thread of solidarity, which connected all the participants, does not exist anymore. Simply—it got lost in the time.” The frequent media stories on the threat of another eventual earthquake in Skopje can be also read in this vein, as the tone of these stories was surprisingly pacifying and under-dramatized: one less trouble to worry about during the annual day of the “tragedy that should never repeat.”⁽³⁸⁾ Moreover, it is important to note that both Večer and Nova Makedonija, the two dominant newspapers, rarely featured the 1963 Skopje earthquake on their cover pages during the 1990s, a tendency that, in the course of the 1990s, appeared to be a prevailing one rather than a simple exception.

Finally, as of 1998 and the first-ever democratic change of government in Macedonia, the legacies of the 1963 Skopje earthquake became the subject of political contestations on a local level. The removal of Tito's statement described in this paper's introduction is more than illustrative in these regards. Prior to the removal of the words, the newly appointed, VMRO-DPMNE-backed director of the Museum (a position within the spoils system), Ǵorgji Čulakovski, removed a permanent exhibition dedicated to the participation of Skopje, Skopjans, and the Skopje region in the People's Liberation War (1941–45), the founding and state-building event of the Second Yugoslavia. Asked to comment on the purportedly illegal removal of the words, Čulakovski initially stressed that the rationale was “purely aesthetic.”⁽³⁹⁾ Notwithstanding, Čulakovski backpedaled twice in the coming years, stating in 2002 that Tito's account was “not as relevant” and that the words were placed “illegally.”⁽⁴⁰⁾ The removal provoked a reaction from the erstwhile Mayor of Skopje, Risto Penov (in office 1996–2004), who stressed that he was received “numerous complaints by revolted citizens” over Čulakovski's “self-proclaimed” decision and that he would try to bring back the exhibition as they were “letters of solidarity, no matter who proclaimed them.”⁽⁴¹⁾ Even though the removal's case lost momentum after 2002, political tension over the 1963 Skopje earthquake would escalate in the coming decades.

The building interethnic cleavages in post-Yugoslav Macedonia culminated in 2001, in a seven-month armed conflict between the Macedonian forces and the ethnic-Albanian radicals. The conflict thus set the tone of the commemorations of the 1963 earthquake in the early 2000s. The 2001 commemoration took place in the midst of the intensified efforts to reach a ceasefire under the banner of “Solidarity day,” while the 2002 commemoration included several commemorative activities that linked post-earthquake solidarity to post-conflict peacebuilding. It is important to mention that the morning ceremony of visiting the Butel Cemetery in Skopje remained a constant feature of the annual commemorations throughout the years, although the media did not always report on this event. The 2003 commemoration, however, neatly exposed the further development of the two commemorative narratives from the 1980s and 1990s into the 2000s. The Skopje City Council's main commemorative event was an awards ceremony at which eight locals received accolades for their “special engagement” in the post-earthquake reconstruction of the city: among them, former city mayors; heads of relevant institutions that helped coordinate the reconstruction, all of whom held office in the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s; as well as some notable citizens of Skopje. At the awards ceremony, Penov praised the engagement of the awardees by stating that “what we are currently working in the city is just a drop in the ocean compared to what those people [the awardees] did.”⁽⁴²⁾ Moreover, Dragoljub Stratev, the former mayor and one of the awardees, made another link between the post-earthquake and post-conflict atmospheres, claiming that “solidarity is what [Macedonians] need the most in these times.”⁽⁴³⁾

The second trajectory was molded around the reinterpretations of the nostalgic discourse for pre-1963 Skopje. This discourse was primarily directed at the urban planning activities in the 1980s (revising some of the post-earthquake urban planning decisions such as the city council's sponsored project). Yet in the early 2000s it was reinvented as a tool for approaching immediate urban issues, and again in the late 2000s and the early 2010s as a focal point of the political tension over the of the Skopje city center outlook. For example, the 2003 commemoration and the discourse about pre-1963 Skopje almost exclusively concerned the pressing issues of sanitation, air pollution, and uncontrolled construction activities. One typical visual media strategy of the day was juxtaposing photographs from pre-earthquake Skopje with ones featuring various illegal objects in the very same spots. In addition, the July 26, 2003, issue of Nova Makedonija featured three texts that relegitimized similar worldviews: a long, one-page recollection of the pre-1963 life of the Skopjan youth with a rather suggestive ending—“and then came July 26 and nothing ever was the same”⁽⁴⁴⁾—and an interview with the writer Lazar M. Drakul, who was sincere in his evaluation that “[e]ven though I live in a modern Skopje now, I no longer feel the spirit of the old Skopje.”⁽⁴⁵⁾ Last, it was Penov himself who provided an additional layer to this nostalgic narrative in a lengthy interview on the occasion of the earthquake anniversary. In it, he claimed that the post-earthquake reconstruction was fast-paced and precise, yet, assessing that “it was a bad momentum [to be] hit by a catastrophe in a period when the modernist tendency was dominating the global architecture; when the old, practically, had no value and, maybe, the negligence over the old [Skopje] architecture was too harsh.” ⁽⁴⁶⁾

The period from 2004 to 2007 was marked by a larger presence of personal and expert accounts of the earthquake and post-earthquake reconstruction legacies in the media. The various orientations towards these two formative events from the recent history of Skopje demonstrated that the two dominant commemorative narratives of the day—the one focused on the solidarity and the urban buildup, and the other based on the nostalgic discourse for pre-1963 Skopje—were more distant than they were at the commemorative events. Already in 2004, when asked if they had the chance to revive one pre-1963 urban activity, several randomly interviewed citizens would have chosen to “return” the “old Skopje korzo [promenade]”—a tradition of evening socializing, which ceased to exist after the earthquake. Post-1963 Skopje was depicted as a place that did not foster socialization among its citizens, a feature apparently inherent to the town before 1963.⁽⁴⁷⁾ The lengthiest overview of the commemorative year of 2007 summed up the series of events with the statement: “[t]oday, Skopje is a pretty, modern city, but also a city that has lost its strand with the past.”⁽⁴⁸⁾ This juxtaposition of pre- and post-earthquake Skopje was not as significant for the expert community, however. A 2005 debate, featured in the daily newspaper Vreme, revealed that the architectural guild agreed that the present-day urban politics failed to build on the premises of the urban planning of the 1960s and 1970s.⁽⁴⁹⁾

The critical juncture in the commemorations of the 1963 Skopje earthquake and the urban politics in the Macedonian capital city came after the Greek veto for full NATO membership status for Macedonia in 2008 and the electoral win of VMRO-DPMNE-backed Koce Trajanovski in the 2009 local elections. The memory politics of the second VMRO-DPMNE-led government are well discussed in scholarship; the key term here is the “Skopje 2014 project,” a term endorsing the 137 memorial objects erected in the city as of 2010 and the corresponding memorializing undertakings across the state. Although the scholarly emphasis was primarily on the partisan reinterpretation of the ancient past and the Greco-Macedonian quarrel over the state name of Macedonia, this set of memory policies also triggered radical shifts in public perception of recent social and political Macedonian history and, subsequently, the urban history of Skopje.⁽⁵⁰⁾ The memory politics in Skopje were heretofore identified as a direct and “nationalistic” response to the post-earthquake reconstruction (aimed, inter alia, at reconstructing some of the most representative objects of pre-1963 Skopje), but also as a general mistreatment of the objects and institutions associated with the Yugoslav Macedonian past.⁽⁵¹⁾ The link between the emerging public discourse on pre-1963 Skopje as of the 1980s and VMRO-DPMNE urban politics in Skopje in the early 2000s, however, was not discussed in the relevant literature; yet, it does appear to be an important aspect of the partisan endorsement, interpretation, and policing of memory narrative as an official memory agenda. A fresh look at the earthquake commemorations of the late 2000s and early 2010s provides a neat illustration of this process.

On the eve of the 2009 local elections, the media publicized Trajanovski's initiative to restart the clock on the old Skopje Central Railway Station's façade, the one that was “frozen” at 5:17 a.m. on July 26, 1963, and stayed in that position ever since, an idea he got during a “recent visit to Paris” when he saw some of the Parisian clock towers and public clocks.⁽⁵²⁾ The idea, however, was not received as enthusiastically by the relevant experts and authorities; Katerina Blaževska, a prominent columnist, even suggested Trajanovski “buy himself a MP3 player if he wants to listen to music.”⁽⁵³⁾ The initiative never saw the light of day. Post-earthquake solidarity was also invoked in 2010 in the context of the “Skopje 2014.” A longer article in the newspaper Dnevnik, for instance, criticized the selection of historical events and figures as their authors did not predict a “monument to the solidarity” in the city.⁽⁵⁴⁾ The debate over the 1963 Skopje earthquake escalated anew in June 2012 when the local authorities proposed a change of the names of 31 city streets, most of them bearing names related to the post-earthquake reconstruction. The oppositional camp even staged a protest against the changes at the city council that ended up being insufficient to stop the assembly. The Skopje earthquake and the post-earthquake reconstruction would ever since that point create heated controversy among the public: in 2013, for instance, the opposition social democrats criticized the VMRO-DPMNE's Prime Minister and President for their failure to attend the ceremony on the 50th anniversary of the earthquake.

The year of 2013 is also marked by the government's decision to refurbish the façade of the Gradski trgovski centar [City trade center] (GTC), a paradigmatic object of the post-earthquake urban reconstruction, and by the social mobilization against this decision. The transethnic front named Go sakam GTC [I love GTC] thus managed to establish a communicative platform for articulating public claims for commons and eventually led to the protection of the center's original outlook. In parallel, Skopje's local museums and contemporary arts strove to rethink the legacy of the post-earthquake reconstruction as early as the late 2000s. Already, in 2009, the Museum of the City of Skopje organized an exhibition entitled “Solidarity” dedicated to the federal and international help toward the city's reconstruction. This topic reappeared in 2010 and 2011 as an exhibition dedicated to the SM. In the following years, the Museum dealt mainly with foreign receptions of the Skopje earthquake, such as, inter alia, the film chronicles of the movie Skopje ‘63 (2014). In 2018, the Museum held an exhibition on the Yugoslav youth brigades and their help in the post-earthquake reconstruction of Skopje. Moreover, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje held a temporary exhibition in 2014 titled “Solidarity: An Unfinished Project?” as a discourse aimed at better understanding its institutional history as well as the notion of solidarity and its reasoning within contemporary society. The reinvention of the 1963 Skopje earthquake and the post-earthquake reconstruction got an additional partisan endorsement in the campaigns for the 2017 local elections. The Social Democrat Petre Šilegov promised to reinstall Tito's message if elected, an operation concluded in 2018 after fierce public debate over the font of the letters. In 2018, 2019, and 2021, the Skopje City Council under Šilegov restored the original names of several city streets that had been changed to reference post-earthquake solidarity and set the annual commemorations of the 1963 Skopje earthquake high on the agenda of the local government.