I guess there is no one on the planet who did not enjoy as a child the adventures of probably the greatest comic book and movie superhero of the 20th century – Superman. The Superman myth is structured – like any religious fairy tale – around a human-like deity with supernatural demiurgic properties, who descends from heaven to order human affairs down on earth, of course, in favor of Good, Justice and general human prosperity and well-being.

Adapted to modern scientific, astronomical and nuclear knowledge that in the dark twentieth century became part of the worldview of the common man, the tale of Superman takes the godman from the fictitious planet Krypton in a space capsule with which his parents rescue him from his home planet an hour before it disappears into natural cosmic cataclysm.

And, like Moses and many other mythical heroes, the baby Superman is found on earth by a couple of ordinary American farmers, who adopt the godman and raise him to become a secretive but omnipresent superhero whose divine powers - which enable him when needed and to stop the rotation of the planet - he will use them without reservation in the protection of ordinary people, always against the forces of Evil, against criminals and criminals, always on the side of Justice and Law.

But in order to ensure mass identification with the superhero, and to add elements of tension to the action, the authors of the comic book invented the "Achilles heel" of Superman, the weakness and the only mortal danger that can destroy him. It is kryptonite, the mysterious material from his home planet, a metal that emits an ominous green radiation, which, if it touches our hero, destroys his strength, weakens and poisons him, and only that, of all the evils on earth, can kill him.
In the endless episodes, the tribulations and triumphs of our superheroine Macedonia, from her infancy, when she was born in the cataclysms of the 20th century, and she is accompanied by her "kryptonite", her prenatal "Achilles heel". And in the fairy tale about Macedonia, her mortal threat was always here somewhere, ready to use its green radioactive effect to weaken, sicken and kill her. Macedonian kryptonite is called "vmro" and is a poisonous and radioactive green-brown substance brought from the Vmro planet Bulgaria.

As in the Superman fairy tale, Macedonia too can live and develop its potentials only outside the action of Bulgaria and only when the Bulgarian political-criminal kryptonite "vmro" - heavy radioactive earth salt extracted from the deep mines of the Great Bulgarian dream - is in small and harmless amounts or completely disappeared in the dark caves and under the heavy stones of history.
As protection against the deadly radiation of kryptonite, Superman used lead armor perfectly woven into his superman flight suit, while the Macedonian lead shield from the birth of the Macedonian state was the powerful Yugoslav state, whose border on the Bulgarian side seemed like an impenetrable high golden wall behind which the object was hidden of Bulgarian wet dreams and wishes.

If Yugoslavia did not exist, Macedonia would not exist either. If history had chosen the Bulgarian dream of San Stefano, there would have been nothing from Macedonia, no memory, no ashes, no asphalt. So when Yugoslavia lay down on its deathbed, the lead shield that protected us from the radioactive radiation of the Bulgarian Vmrovshtina also fell.

It is a historical irony that we rejoiced at the first international recognition of Macedonian independence by Bulgaria at the time, because no one or few people recognized the green glow in that act. Bulgaria celebrated the fall of the golden wall that stood between the Great Bulgarian dream and its future, and with the express recognition drove the death nail into the coffin of Yugoslavia, ensuring that the dead one would not change her mind and rise. And we were looking forward to our first international recognition as little kids…which we later turned out to be.
Elem, in the fairy tale about the Balkan superheroine Macedonia, the Bulgarian green radiation weakened and killed her since her mythical ideals, since the time of Gotse Delchev, Dame Gruev and Gjorce Petrov. The periods in which the Bulgarian kryptonite prevailed, in all the incursions of the Bulgarian soldiers, in the First and the Second World War, and in all the periods of Vmrov epidemics, from 1920 when the vmro was founded, until 1934 when it was abolished, from 1941 when the vmrovs stopped with the Bulgarian fascist occupation until 1945 when together with the fascist alliance they lost the war. And, finally, since 1990, in all the periods when Vemeret was in power (1990-92, 1998-2002 and 2006-2017), Macedonia is in kryptonite crises, weakened, in convulsions in which it risks its life.

In the last episode of Macedonia Eternal, the battle with the Bulgarian-Vmrovan nemesis takes completely perverted, even apocalyptic forms. After the disappearance of the Yugoslav lead armor, Macedonia recognized its only and no-alternative path to shelter behind the shield of NATO and the EU. And, on that way, Vmrov's kryptonite managed to push the candidate several times and rape her in the ditches of the European road, but she rose persistently, freed herself from the green radiation, and staggered resolutely towards the final protection in the warm arms of Europe. And, finally, on the last bridge that spans the European chasms, she herself, Immaculate Europe, put the exhausted candidate in front of an unsolvable situation, in which she can only walk towards her destiny.
Europe impaled Bulgaria as its Purgatory, delivered Macedonia right into the arms of its historical negation, its political and cultural death, into the arms of the more vampiric Great Bulgarian fascist zombie, which spread its disintegrating arms through which the ominous green rays of the death void pierce on the corpse.

But that is not the only mortal danger for our heroine, because every step in fulfilling the Bulgarian conditions on the way to Europe strengthens the domestic vmro, increases its radiation, which, due to its proximity and endogenous nature, is always more deadly than the external Bulgarian one. What is our superheroine to do when both in front and behind her the steep banks are already glowing with the green curse?!
In fact, in this last episode of the fairy tale about the eternally young and slow-thinking Macedonia, she no longer decides on either the road or the destination, that is, the direction she will go. Forces much stronger than her weak strength, crushed by the fatal radiation, govern her destiny, so the dilemma of whether to abandon herself to the arms of Bulgarian or Vmrovian nothingness is practically not hers. The solution is fateful and simple: the movement towards the European destination inevitably throws her into both arms, both Bulgarian and Vmrov. The fairy tale seems to end in the blinding flashes of the eruption of the molten green metal, in the cold bath of green light, in which Macedonia will be warmed only by the memories of the European values ​​in which she was convinced that she would take refuge. Or, to paraphrase what an unsurpassed political fox said, in a much more deadly situation: There is no escape for the candidate, but there is no way to fail.

The author is a professor