Paper long abstract:

The ethnocratic order in Macedonia that emerged in response to a larger crisis of recognition and acceptance on the international stage, reached its culmination with the symbolic reconstruction of Skopje as a grand national capital. The forceful reordering of the public space produced the first grass-root urban social movement and stirred a generation raised under constant crisis to react by staging creative protests and using new social media to communicate its ideas. From a diachronic perspective and based on my fieldwork findings, moving from global, regional, national to local levels, via ANT, I attribute agency to the Old Turkish Bazaar, its pace, soundscapes, smellscapes and traditional codes of civility and modes of conviviality and argue that this space has transformed itself from a border zone of the last decade into a contact zone recently and carries the potential for wider social transformations. The radical intervention in the public space, in the space of the last esnafi and of young Archibrigadiers brings them together as main challengers of the ethnocratic regime.