SKOPJE IN THE WORKS OF FRENCH TRAVEL WRITERS IN THE SECOND DECADE OF THE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURIES

Abstract

The City of Skopje was presented in many works by domestic and foreign authors, but the subject of this seminar paper is Skopje in the works of French travel writers, who visited and wrote their impressions of this city in the second decade of the XIX and early XX centuries. In the second decade of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the European public was very interested about the situation on the Macedonian land. It’s the time of the Balkan Wars and the First World War, and the French travel writers, among which military officers also wrote about these events. Besides political and events in the battlefields, also wrote about cultural processes, spiritual and material culture, and they also wrote about the cities through which they passed, and among the most important cities was Skopje. French travel writers Ami Boue, Commander Leon Lamouche, General Herr Frederic-Georges, Louis Leger, Gabriel Louis-Jaray, Andre Cherdamme, Colonel Andre Orioni and other travel writers stayed on the Macedonian land, and passing through Skopje they wrote about people, the town, the architecture, religious objects and they presented their works to the European and French readers. In this paper we used the methodology of historical analysis and heuristics, methods of analysis and synthesis, literature of travel writers in French, and we compared this material and made an analysis of the content and argument synthesis in order to get to objective conclusions. In this paper we have tried to prove that during the second decade of the twentieth century in Skopje there was a rich spiritual and material cultural and that this was recorded by French travel writers. Keywords: travel writers, Skopje, Macedonia, culture, architecture.