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bulgaria / MacEdonia | 81 Venko Markovski (1915–1988) The author of the only book about the notorious Adriatic prison camp island Goli otok—Marshal Tito’s Devil’s Island—to appear in English, Markovski was a native Bulgarian who was born in Skopje, the present capital of Macedonia. He received his secondary education in Skopje but later studied at a university in Sofia, Bulgaria. Markovski truly had two homelands, Macedonia and Bulgaria. He made a reputation as a writer of poetry in Bulgarian while at the same time publishing in Macedonian and in fact played an important role in the creation of the modern standard Macedonian literary language as well as the Macedonian alphabet. During World War II, he joined Tito’s Partisans in Macedonia and is credited with the composition of some of the most popular Partisan songs. He also began rising in the ranks of the Yugoslav Communist Party. In 1948, he broke with Tito over the issue of Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform. His loyalty to Stalin cost him detention in the internment camp for political prisoners in Idrizovo, on the outskirts of Skopje. In 1956, he was sentenced to five years hard labor on Goli otok under the pseudonym Veniamin Milanov Tošev. Markovski maintained that the esteem in which he was held would have led to widespread protests over his incarceration were it known that he was a prisoner on the island. Once out of prison, Markovski went to Bulgaria in 1965 where he remained until his death in 1988. While there he published a large number of poems of a political and Bulgarian nationalist character and became prominent on the Bulgarian political scene. He was a member of the Bulgarian Parliament for several years, was named to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1979, and was awarded the highest Bulgarian state order, Hero of Bulgaria, in 1985. To the very end, Markovski remained bitterly anti-Titoist, anti-Serb, and unrepentantly pro-Stalin. The following excerpts are from Markovski’s Goli Otok: The Island of Death (East European Monographs, 1984), 25, 35–37, 57–59, 67, 68–69, 122–23, a graphic and emotionally intense diary in letters about his imprisonment on Goli otok that was published originally in English in the United States; no Bulgarian original seems to exist, although the book must have been written in that language. from Goli Otok: The Island of Death You ask where I am. I am on Goli Otok.4 Until 1948 no one even knew that such a place existed. It is an island in the Adriatic, an island that is subjected to strange and changeable weather. If there is a storm brewing, even in the heat 82 | bulgaria / MacEdonia of summer, it is as cold as winter here. But if it is sunny, even in the midst of a severe winter, it is like the hottest of summers. The island is nothing but rocks, rocks that are enveloped in a spectral silence during our blood-red sunsets. The sinister squeaking of the seagulls cuts through the silence like a knife. The mute sea suddenly falls calm, and for a moment one feels lost in the most terrifying corner of the world’s most awful dungeon. One feels as if one has entered the anteroom of a terrestrial hell. . . . Is it possible for such an inhuman jail to be hidden from human eyes in the middle of the twentieth century? Can this have occurred in a country whose leaders fought for a brighter future, for the happiness of their people, for equality among all those people? What in fact is Goli Otok? What is its history? Did Satan himself come to earth to create it? Is man such a hellish creature that he can create this diabolical inferno? Shadows—not real human beings—dwell on Goli Otok, shadows of our former freedom fighters. On Goli Otok human beings are reduced to things, to numbers; they are treated as mere quantities; they live in rags and tatters. From dawn to dusk a sorrowful train of people moves back and forth across the desert that is Goli Otok. Their eyes are sunken; their hands have been broken in inhuman toiling. Their legs drag as if bound by heavy chains. Their heads are bent low. They don’t talk, they don’t even look around. Each of these shadows is a loose page torn from a shattered life. Who are these people? Where have they come from? What crime...

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