The book is the result of a field research in Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, as part of the MA Anthropology degree program of the University of Zadar, Croatia.

During the project, we received great help from Prof. Ljupčo Risteski from the Anthropology Department of University of Skopje. He also contributed a paper titled Himalayan, yet ours, a postsocialist saga of the Macedonian Kingdom in the Himalayas, in which he discusses historical and current aspects of the Macedonian ethnic identity as illustrated by the Hunza royal family’s visit from the Himalayan foothills to Macedonia. In the paper, this event is presented as a trend toward searching for ethnicity beyond Europe in order to prove the archaic origin of the country’s ethnic identity.

Goran Ledenčan contributed a paper with the title Visual (Re)presentations of Skopje – New Images of the Old City. The essay deals with visual (re)presentations of the City of Skopje and the changes of its cityscape in the course of a project called Skopje 2014. This urban renewal project was sponsored by the government of the Republic of Macedonia starting in 2010, but it has been stirring up heated discussions and controversies since its very beginning. The paper analyzes the costly buildings and monuments through a cultural-anthropological perspective of place and space, ethnocracy, image, territoriality, identity etc.

In her essay Mother Teresa – An Intercultural and Interreligious Icon, Snježana Zorić constructed an intertextual paper that deals hermeneutically with certain questions about the genuineness of the unique mission of Mother Teresa, who was an ethnic Albanian from Macedonia. The aim of this essay is not to simply confirm a saintly image of Mother Teresa and to conceal the negative perceptions of her work, but it is an attempt to place her work within an intercultural and interreligious “third space” of “in-between” and the “theology of suffering” she advocated.

The other contributors were Ljupčo S. Risteski, Ana Hrkač and Helena Tonković.