Speech by President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova at the Opening of the 64th Struga Poetry Evenings

Struga, 21 August 2025

Esteemed Director of the Struga Poetry Evenings, Mr. Nikola Kukunes,
Esteemed Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mr. Zoran Ljutkov,
Esteemed poets,
Distinguished guests,
Dear citizens of Struga,
It is an honour to be in the company of some seventy poets, as well as many critics, translators, literary
collaborators, and lovers of poetry, here in the Macedonian and world capital of poetry.
What does the history of this great event tell us?
In 1961, sixty-four years ago, a group of Macedonian poets gathered here in Struga to mark the
centenary of the publication of the Miladinov Brothers’ Collection. They were, in fact, the founders of
the Struga Poetry Evenings, who established Struga as a cultural and poetic republic.
As you walk through the Park of Poetry, past the Nobel laureates: Neruda, Montale, Brodsky, Heaney,
and Tranströmer, but also our own greats: Koneski, Mateski, and Urošević, you feel, if only for a
moment, that you yourself have become part of the anthology of contemporary world poetry.
This year, they will be joined by the great Slovak poet, Ivan Štrpka.
The defining hallmarks of Struga’s poetic republicanism are universality, openness, inclusiveness,
equality, talent, competitiveness, and love of freedom. The democratic polis of Struga’s poetry is not
guided by ideology, politics, or geopolitics; rather, it bestows the Golden Wreath upon poets from
different continents, states, systems, and nations. Let us recall Wystan Hugh Auden and Allen Ginsberg,
Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca and Yiannis Ritsos, Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish.
The poetic society of Struga is an egalitarian community that has honoured women poets such as
Desanka Maksimović, Nancy Morejón, Margaret Atwood, Ana Blandiana, Carol Ann Duffy, and many
others.
Struga does not forget young poets either. In cooperation with UNESCO, it presents the “Bridges of
Struga” prize, which this year will be awarded the Polish poet Mateusz Szymczyk.
Thanks to the power of translation, the poetic republic of Struga has grown into a unique, fertile, and
original laboratory of word-crafting.
Do you not think that the Struga poetic story is the best example, the very model, of Delchev’s vision of
cultural competition among nations, all the more relevant in these dreadful times of conflict and war
that recall Lorca?

And while we here in Struga celebrate poetry, the world continues its contest in armaments and its race
for profit at the expense of humanity and nature. We speak of peace and cooperation, while they wage
wars and inflict untold human suffering.
Inevitable questions arise before us: Is poetry relevant today, and to what extent, in an age of
distraction and the tyranny of the urgent, when more and more people are anchored to their mobiles,
their computers, and their small screens, seduced and addicted to sensationalism without substance,
lost in the virtual world and blinded by videocracy and spectacle?
Can poetry soothe us, heal us, and cure us in the face of the epidemic of indifference to the suffering of
those close to us or those who are different from us?
Can poetry free us from the digital walls in which we have imprisoned ourselves?
And how relevant are you, the poets, in an age when, in just a few seconds, the algorithms of artificial
intelligence can generate verses in your style, with such skill they can deceive even the most devoted
lovers of the poetic word?
Does this seemingly naïve play of imitation, improvisation, simulation, mimicry, and chameleonism,
implicitly send the message that artificial intelligence may even replace poets and poetic creation itself?
Is the poetic republic of Struga under threat of becoming a utopia?
To answer these questions, we must once again return to the dilemma faced by Dostoevsky and
Solzhenitsyn, one that Jean-Pierre Siméon sought to answer: “Can beauty, art, and/or poetry save the
world? Can poetry change us, and through us, change reality?”
In my view, the answer depends on whether we believe in the power of words or not.
To those who do not believe in the strength of the Word, I would remind them that speech was there in
the beginning, and later came the banned books. Among them was the ABECEDAR, published in Athens
in 1925, a hundred years ago, under pressure from the League of Nations. It was immediately seized and
destroyed, precisely because of the power of words to awaken the Macedonian language and identity in
Macedonian children.
Or think of the Miladinov brothers, and of the other revivalists, who with tireless devotion collected and
recorded the people’s words, songs, customs, riddles, and tales in order to preserve them from oblivion
and disappearance.
If words hold no power, then why have the powerful, in every epoch of history, sought to control them
and their creators, from Ovid to Lorca?
Overlords have always known that poetry is not merely an aesthetic experience, an oral or written
record of feelings and thoughts, but also an ethical stance towards the fundamental problems of life and
society.

As the consciousness and conscience of their time, poets, like prophets of the Old Testament, expose
lies and denounce injustices, acting as bearers of light and of enlightenment. Otherwise, they betray
their calling or fall into l’artpourl’artism.
The Macedonian poet and first president of the Council of the Struga Poetry Evenings, Aco Šopov, once
said that you poets, in the poem, are as if in a cold cave where immense, scattered, petrified words lie. It
is you who must save them from death, awaken them from their petrified sleep, and bring them back to
life.
And the living word was, and remains, a powerful and effective weapon. Speech can confront us with
the truth, awaken our conscience, stir our humanity, heal our wounds, free our imagination, and thus,
by moving us to action, reshape reality.
The living word, the poetic word, teaches, transforms. The strength of the poetic republic, the strength
of the Struga Poetry Evenings lies within it and flows from it.
And what about artificial intelligence? someone might ask. Will it not replace poets?
I, too, ask myself and pose the question: can the algorithms of artificial intelligence feel longing for the
South, or unrest born of frost and darkness, or an unbridled yearning for Ohrid and Struga?
Can algorithms feel awe before the clear lake and the mountains that embrace it, or experience
transformation in the presence of divine beauty? Can they capture and convey inner feelings, moments
of love, passion, sorrow, or anger? Can they grasp the unrepeatable fragments that make us special,
unique human beings? Can algorithms bring words to life? No. Fortunately, not yet.
What is impossible for artificial intelligence is possible for you. Only you, poets, are the masters of
feelings and the magicians of the word. It is no coincidence that Percy Shelley concluded A Defence of
Poetry in 1821 with the words: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
This is your poetic republic. From here, from Struga, you have changed the world, and you can change it
still by building eternal poetic bridges out of indestructible materials: thoughts and words, woven
together with mind and feelings.
The focus on the Glagolitic script takes us back 1,160 years, to the Old Church Slavonic language and to
the immense unifying role of the pan-Slavic enlighteners Cyril and Methodius, to literacy, and to its
closest companion — poetry.
I welcome the revival of the most important hallmarks of the Struga Poetry Evenings: the readings at the
monument to Saint Clement in Ohrid, the poetic voyage and poetry reading in Saint Naum, and the
poetry matinée in the courtyard of the Church of St. Mary Peribleptos.
I look forward to the significant publishing achievments, including the monograph of this year’s laureate,
Ivan Štrpka.

To be among you, poets, and to hear your poetry is a true honour. I believe that after the 64th edition
of the Struga Poetry Evenings, Struga , and indeed the world, will not be the same.
It is my great pleasure to declare this year’s Struga Poetry Evenings officially open!
Embrace it, for during these evenings, Struga is unlike any other.