Upper Reka


Upper Reka is a geographic and ethnographic subregion of the broader Reka region of western Republic of Macedonia, including settlements within the upper left portion of the Municipality of Mavrovo and Rostuša and of Gostivar Municipality. The region is home to both a Muslim Albanian community and Christian Orthodox Albanian speaking population that self identifies as Macedonians, though with some notable exceptions in past and recent times.
Upper Reka is an alpine mountainous and rugged region with animal grazing and highland pastures. In contemporary times, the largest inhabited settlement is the village of Vrbjani. Upper Reka is an isolated and underdeveloped region with limited communication links, whereby access and travel becomes difficult during the snowy winter months.
Historically Upper Reka inhabitants mainly engaged with agricultural and farming activities of which some of the remaining population continues to do. The region has experienced much depopulation over time due to seasonal or permanent migration to nearby regions and abroad in search of employment and better living standards. In the 14th century Upper Reka was part of the Lordship of Prilep, of the Mrnjavčević family, until 1395, when its territory was subjugated to Bayezid I of the Ottoman Empire under which it remained until the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. Thereafter it became part of Kingdom of Serbia, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and eventually part of the Republic of Macedonia.

Geography and Environment

Location

The broader Reka region is divided into Mala, Dolna and Golema or Gorna sub-regions. Upper Reka alongside the wider Reka region was also considered to belong to the larger region of Dibra that encompasses multiple sub-regions centered around the town of Debar on both sides of the Albanian-Macedonian border.
The region of Upper Reka is bordered by Kosovo to the north and by Albania in the west. It is a mountainous area with highland alpine pastures, situated at the northern end of the Radika river basin that continues on into Lower Reka all the way to the southern Boškov Bridge, near the area of Small Reka. Upper Reka's northern and northeastern territorial borders consist of the Vraca Mountains which are part of the wider Šar Mountains that extend nearby as the Ničpur Mountains with Lera peak at 2194 m. The northwest and western borders of Upper Reka go along the Korab Mountains with Golem Korab peak at 2753 m. A narrow pass at 1920 m above sea level, between the Korab and Šar Mountains exists that allows for communication and interaction with the ethnographic/geographic Gora region. Through this opening, located between the three point border mountain peak of Ksulje e Priftit at 2092 m and the Vraca Mountains is the most suitable communication link between the former village of Štirovica at the extreme northern end of Upper Reka and Restelica village at the southern edge of the Gora region in Kosovo.
The southern border of Upper Reka is on the right side within the valley of the river Radika. It is between the villages of Vrbjani in Upper Reka and Žirovnica in Lower Reka that are represented by geographical and communicative limitations presented by the imposing Korab Mountains. A road links both villages and is the main outlet for transitory communication between within the area that goes all the way to Debar. The eastern part of the southern border from the left side of the Radika river valley fully belongs to the Bistra Mountains with Medenica peak at 2163 m. An eastern road that intersects with the others at Volkovija village heads toward near Vrben village at Upper Reka's eastern limits. Onward that road continues toward to Mavrovi Anovi town and Mavrovo Lake and further on to Gostivar. Apart from the main Radika river, a series of tributaries that feed it are found throughout Upper Reka such as Dlaboka Reka, Brodečka Reka, Ribnička Reka and so on. Highland mountain alpine pastures used for livestock grazing by the local populace are found throughout the mountainous region such as Rečka Planina, Nistrovski Korab and Ḱafa Kadis. In total, the confines of the Upper Reka region covers an area of about.

Settlements

Upper Reka settlements within Mavrovo and Rostuša Municipality include Tanuše, Nivište, Ribnica, Žužnje, Nistrovo, Ničpur, Volkovija, Kičinica, Krakornica, Beličica, Vrben, Bogdevo, Sence, Vrbjani, Bibaj and Grekaj. Upper Reka settlements within Gostivar Municipality are Brodec. Traditionally three other adjacent villages, Duf and Orḱuše in Mavrovo and Rostuša Municipality and Gorno Jelovce all within the neighboring Upper Polog region have at times also been considered belonging to Upper Reka, due to linguistic affiliations and cultural connections. Also due to uprisings in the Upper Reka region, former settlements such as: Trnica, Reč, Dubovo, Štirovica, Strezimir and Zavojsko were burned down by Serbian and Bulgarian forces between 1912–1916.

Climate, fauna and wildlife

The Upper Reka region is the only area within Macedonia to have a cold Alpine climate. Due to the high altitude, the region is exposed to winds from various directions. From the east, the strong gusts of what Upper Reka locals refer to as era bardh, literally the white wind, the rain-bringing warm southeast wind ladas and the northwest wind heralding weather change called era poshtr or low wind. The region is exposed to thunderstorms mainly during summer, while rain, frost, hail and rainbows occur according to seasonal weather patterns. The winter season is often long and snowy and so too is the summer season, while spring and autumn seasons are short. Snow mostly appears in the region from the middle of autumn lasting until mid-spring. It recent times snow fall continues late into spring and even at times into early summer. Due to snow fall, Upper Reka becomes an isolated region as communication for most of the year with neighbouring areas is severely limited and even impassable such as that with Albania through the Korab Mountains. In past times, the population was forced during the short summer season to supply food grains, salt, beans and other food stuffs as snow made communications difficult between nearby villages and the outside world. Most of Upper Reka along with Dolna Reka is located within Mavrovo National Park. In the area of Upper Reka, parts of the region still contain virgin forests of old and unique species of Beech trees especially around Dlaboka river and the northern part of the Radika river valley. Parts of Upper Reka forests were felled until the 1950s to create pastures for sheep grazing. Upper Reka is also home to the critically endangered subspecies of Eurasian lynx, the Balkan lynx.

Demographics

Population and Identity

Upper Reka is inhabited by Muslim and Christian Albanian speaking people referred through demonyms in Macedonian as Gornorekanec and Rekali in Albanian. By outsiders they are referred to as Shkreti, from the Albanian word and expression shkretë/i shkret meaning the poor ones, due to their isolated mountainous homeland and difficult living circumstances. Of the Albanian speaking populations who remained Christian Orthodox, they assimilated and identify as Macedonians, while those who embraced Islam consider themselves Albanians. Due to the migration of Orthodox Christians to urban centers a few decades ago, today the majority of inhabitants are Muslim Albanians, with a minority of Orthodox Albanian speakers, who self-identify as Macedonians. The largest Muslim Albanian settlement in Upper Reka today is Vrbjani with 625 inhabitants. While the main Orthodox settlement today is Vrben with 142 inhabitants. In Upper Reka, households are called shpi or literally house and traditionally consisted of patriarchal extended families. These families, some affluent ones, lived in large and at times fortified multi story stone dwellings called kulla or tower house while other families had smaller houses. The adjacent Lower Reka or Dolna Reka region is inhabited by Macedonian Muslims, whereas a minority are Orthodox Macedonians. Small Reka, or Mala Reka, meanwhile, is inhabited solely by Orthodox Macedonians and the populations of Small and Lower Reka belong to the Slavic ethnographic group of Mijaks, who speak the Macedonian Reka dialect.

Economy and Seasonal/Permanent migration

Due to difficult living circumstances and at times sociopolitical disturbances, especially in the 19th century, Upper Reka has historically been a region with much outward temporary and permanent migration. Traditionally the population was mainly engaged with animal husbandry and agricultural activities which some of the small remaining population still carry out. As such during the late Ottoman era, Upper Reka males would seasonally go on kurbet or economic migration. Often they would find employment as pastry makers or as halva, salep and boza merchants and salesmen in the then Ottoman capital Istanbul or regional cities like Skopje and Edirne. In Romania and Bulgaria, some Upper Reka people were also employed in the housing construction industry as stonemasons or builders and likewise when the need arose in cities such as Shkodër or their local area too.
Permanent migratory flows during the late Ottoman era were mainly to neighbouring villages and regions where today these populations often form few households within a settlement amongst their wider Albanian population. In the region of Upper Polog, Upper Reka people relocated to the following villages: Čegrane, Forino, Korito, Balin Dol, Malo Turčane, Dolna Banjica, Sretkovo, Novo Selo, Rečane, Vrutok, Pečkovo, Zdunje, Vrapčište, Kalište and Gradec. In Lower Polog: Gorno Sedlarce, Rakovec, Žerovjane, Radiovce, Tenovo, Lukovica, Sedlarevo and Gurgurnica. In villages within the vicinity of Skopje city: Crn Vrv, Krušopek, Sveta Petka and Patiška Reka, while near Veles at: Gorno Jabolčište, Sogle, Klukovec and Buzalkovo. In some villages, the Upper Reka population migrated there as Christians like in Lukovica and only converted thereafter to Islam. While in Patiška Reka, they remained Orthodox and Albanian speaking until World War Two, before relocating to Skopje thereafter. Some Upper Reka residents from Vrbjani have in recent decades migrated to the neighbouring Muslim Macedonian village of Žirovnica with municipal services in Lower Reka and number some 258 people. While Orthodox Christians migrated from the 1950s onwards to the then Yugoslav capital Belgrade, other cities like Skopje and to nearby Gostivar town where they form the main population of Durtlok neighbourhood. Due to the 2001 insurgency in northern Macedonia, the village of Tanuše was affected by the conflict which made some residents migrate thereafter to other places. Young Upper Reka people in recent times have also emigrated to Western countries, while some older inhabitants return to their homes in Upper Reka during the summer period.

Language and Culture

Upper Reka Albanian dialect

The Albanian Upper Reka sub-dialect belongs to the larger Gheg dialect spoken by Northern Albanians. In contemporary times, Muslim Albanians residing in Upper Reka are to varying degrees also bilingual in the Macedonian language. Amongst the Orthodox population still residing in Upper Reka, in terms of daily speech are mainly fluent in Albanian amongst themselves and even the young.

Observances, Customs and other folk culture

In Upper Reka, a number of secular and religious holidays are celebrated. Secular celebrations are Diten e Vers celebrated March 1. The main Orthodox Christian celebrations are Shnkrysh and Blagavesht. Other important celebrations are the feast days of saints such as Shingjergj, Shumtanas, Shmitr, Shën Eremia, Shën Mëria and St. Barbara. Muslim celebrations are Sultan Nevrus, Ramadan and the two Bajrams. The traditional clothing of Upper Reka, though sharing similarities with clothing of surrounding areas, is known for its distinctive regional style and use of multiple colours, as well as complex floral and other patterns.

History

Origins

Various positions exist about the origins of the Upper Reka population within Balkan related scholarship. One of the earliest authors to write about the matter was Serbian journalist Spiridon Gopčević. In his now discredited work regarding the Balkans, Gopčević claimed that Upper Reka inhabitants were “Albanianized Slavs”. In the late 1890s Štilijan Čaparoski and folklorist Panajot Ginoski, both from Galičnik, Dolna Reka, maintained that Upper Reka inhabitants spoke a corrupted form of Albanian that was understood only by the locals, and contained a mixture of Slavic and Albanians words. Russian linguist Afanisiy Selishchev in the 1930s wrote that the inhabitants of Upper Reka were Slavs that underwent Albanianization, due in part to some toponyms being Albanian translated variants of Slavic forms. Serbian ethnographer Toma Smiljanić from Tresonče, Dolna Reka stated that on the eve of World War I Upper Reka had 274 native households and 107 households with origins from territory in Albania and nine households from other regions. Smiljanić affirmed that the Upper Reka population originated from a community of Serbs from the Peć surroundings that settled in territory once inhabited by Miyaks, and then mixed with Albanians and perhaps also Turks and Vlachs, adopting a mixed speech of Albanian and Serbo-Croatian with some Turkish linguistic influence.
Due to some patronymic names of families, Serbian philologist Dušan Nedeljković contended a Vlach origin for some Upper Reka families, alongside Slavic origins that were Albanianized. Historian Nick Atanasovski, who did fieldwork in Lower Reka contends that the sub-regions of Small, Lower and Upper Reka were subjected to Islamisation, though not colonisation. While anthropologist Mirjana Mirčevska who did field work in Upper Reka during the 2000s, stated that both the Muslim and Orthodox population was mainly of Macedonian Slavic origin, with possible Albanian elements in their ethnogenesis. Mirčevska recorded local Upper Reka traditions in Bogdevo, Krakornica and Ničpur that attribute the founding of those villages to three brothers: Boge, Krako and Niko who originated from the Kolašin region located in contemporary Montenegro. During the 18th century Mirčevska contends the population was Islamised and Albanianized after the arrival of Catholic and Muslim Albanians from what is today Albania. Mirčevska also states that the non-Slavic character and origins of some Upper Reka individuals in Ottoman defters and contemporary families are due to a Vlach origin. This is based on past names and contemporary language terms regarding kinship originating from Aromanian and not Albanian.
Vasil Kanchov, a Bulgarian ethnographer who compiled detailed ethno-linguistic statistics on Macedonia's then population wrote in 1900 that Upper Reka was inhabited by Muslim and Orthodox Albanians. Kanchov wrote that their presence was old and may have also contained traces of an Albanianzed Slavic population. Galaba Palikruševa, examining medieval Ottoman tax registers or defters of the region in the 1970s regarding personal names, stated that there was a prominent non-Slavic element in Upper Reka of Albanian and/or Vlach origin. As such, Palikruševa contended that certain scholarship which stated that the contemporary Upper Reka population was Slavs who adopted the Albanian language to preserve their Christian faith is an untenable position. Historian Dimitar Bechev regards the Christian populace of Upper Reka as Orthodox Albanian speakers, whereas historian Noel Malcolm considers them to be Orthodox Albanians. Albanian philologist Edibe Selimi-Osmani who did fieldwork in Upper Reka during the 1990s and 2000s regarded the population as being of Albanian origin.
Linguist Qemal Murati, referring to both the Muslim and Orthodox population as Albanians argued that scholars who suggested the Upper Reka population are Albanianized Slavs have done so due to nationalist reasons so as to deny the historical Albanian element in the region. Murati also states that certain Upper Reka Albanian vocabulary regarding kinship attributed to a Vlach origin does not suffice. This is due to those Albanian words being direct borrowings from Latin that had not undergone an intermediate stage in Aromanian before entering the Albanian language. In the early 2010s, scholar Andrea Pieroni and a team of researchers from various national backgrounds did fieldwork and a comparative study of past and present Upper Reka botanical terminology. In their findings they concluded that the Upper Reka population was one that “had been heavily influenced by the Slavic culture - and not vice versa, as Spiridon Gopčević stated.” The research team attributed that acculturation process to the imposition of the border in 1912 limiting contact with Albania and extensive interactions with surrounding multiethnic regions where trade was undertaken. In addition Slavic languages and culture played a role in that process due to they being the national and dominating ones of the state. The team also identified that there was some Aromanian botanical terminology present in the Upper Reka dialect.

Medieval Ottoman period

During the 14th century Upper Reka was part of the Lordship of Prilep, of the Mrnjavčević family, until 1395, when its territory was subjugated to Bayezid I of the Ottoman Empire. In 1467 Ottoman defters list the region of Reka as a vilayet and in Upper Reka there were 15 inhabited villages and 3 uninhabited ones. The following villages recorded for the first time were: Štirovica, Ribnica, Vrben, Ničpur, Nistrovo, Volkovija, Žužnje, Brodec, Krakornica, Strezimir, and Ribničica, with Vrbjani being the largest settlement. Beličica, Kičinica and Leskovo were listed as uninhabited. The villages of Nivišta, Bibaj, Grekaj, Reč and Tanuše where not registered as existing at that time. Personal names in these villages show Slavic and Vlach and/or Albanian character. In 1519, a few Muslim households are counted within Ottoman defters in villages like Vrbjani, Sence, Ribničica and Kučuk or Small Ribnica. Some names recorded in those registers from a Vlach and/or Albanian derivation were: Vlashe Tanush, Gon Vlash, Duka or Doka Mihail, Lazar son of Kalina, Miho Shalis, Kirk Bard, Gin Sherk or Shirk, Gego Sherk and others. Examples of names indicating a Vlach and/or Albanian derivation with a possible Slavic symbiosis were: Gerg son of Andreya, Dabich Loz/e, Progon Tome, Dzheko son of Gerg, Miho Meksha, Petko son of Miho, Pavle Sherk and so on. By 1583, the number of Muslim households listed in Ottoman defters had increased making up a sizable minority in the villages of: Vrbjani, Sence and Vrben. A few Muslim households began to appear in the villages of: Krakornica, Strezimir, Štirovica and Žužnje.

Middle to Late Ottoman period

Intensive conversion to Islam occurred in Upper Reka from the late 18th century, and continued until the mid 19th century. The village of Štirovica was the last settlement where its 30 remaining Christian households converted to Islam in 1855. Various Muslim and Orthodox Upper Reka inhabitants still retain memories of family ties and distant common ancestors. A small Catholic population was also present that stemmed from some Catholic Albanians who migrated to Upper Reka from nearby areas located in contemporary Albania and later became assimilated.
Due to Upper Reka's isolation and difficult living conditions, some inhabitants turned to banditry during the 18th and 19th century while others migrated to cities and regions for work. In the late Ottoman period the wider Reka area formed a nahiye or district with its centre in Žirovnica village that had administrative officials and a small army garrison. Orthodox Christian villages of Upper Reka in the late Ottoman period either had a Bulgarian or Serbian village priest. Due to the Macedonian struggle, these priests were sometimes replaced with one or the other depending on the fluid church allegiances of a settlement's Orthodox inhabitants. Certain Orthodox individuals from Upper Reka during this time like Josif Bageri made significant contributions to the Albanian national awakening.

Yugoslav period

Ottoman rule lasted until the First Balkan War with the arrival of the Serbian army that annexed the region into Serbia. In 1913, Muslim Albanians of the region, led by imam Malik Mema, rose up against Serbian forces and managed to free the region and also some villages of the Gostivar area. During World War I, local resistance continued as the region passed to Bulgaria. As such Serbian and Bulgarian forces during 1912-1916 burned down the villages of Trnica, Reč, Dubovo, Štirovica and Strezimir. The region later became part of Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In 1941 after Yugoslavia's occupation by Axis powers, Upper Reka was attached to Albania by Fascist Italy. Communist partisan resistance emerged from villages like Beličica that fought against Albanian fascist Balli Kombëtar forces which supported Upper Reka's inclusion into Albania. On 19 September 1944, after 19 Partisans were captured, they along with 17 Beličica villagers were massacred by Ballist forces headed by Aqif Reçani near the area of the former village of Trnica. After World War II, Upper Reka became part of Communist Yugoslavia. The region remained isolated and undeveloped which resulted in migrations to distant urban centres like Belgrade, Skopje and Gostivar, and to Western countries.

Within Macedonia

Upper Reka became part of the Republic of Macedonia, when the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, a republic within Yugoslavia, gained independence following a referendum in 1991. During the 2001 Albanian insurgency some Macedonian military police, stationed in the village of Tanuše, damaged the village mosque to prevent its possible use by NLA guerrillas. In recent times, there have been various forms of cultural revival within Upper Reka such as the festival Takimet e Rekës së Epërme which was first held during August 2014 in the village of Ribnica. A cultural association named Josif Bageri has also been established by some prominent Upper Reka members from both Muslim and Christian backgrounds aiming at socio-cultural, historical and linguistic preservation of Upper Reka heritage. Meanwhile, amongst Upper Reka Orthodox Christians, controversies have arisen over identity and the church. For example, a few prominent individuals like Branko Manoilovski from the Upper Reka Christian Orthodox community have publicly declared an Albanian identity or origin, while others such as Branislav Sinadinovski have called for an Albanian Orthodox Church to be present within the region.

Gallery

Notable people

Documentaries and other cultural material