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Aco Šopov, “The Soul of the Lyric Mill"
Born in Štip in 1923, Aco Šopov [pronounced : Atso Shopov] is among the most eminent poets of 20th-century Southeast Europe. After a long illness, he passed away in Skopje in 1982.
While still in high school, Šopov joined the Yugoslav communist youth movement and, two years later, the anti-fascist resistance in the mountains, where he lost his beloved Vera Jocić, who was later proclaimed a national heroine after World War II. He dedicated the poem Eyes to her, which quickly became the Macedonian equivalent of Éluard’s "Liberty".
On World Poetry Day in 2023, UNESCO celebrated the centenary of the Macedonian poet’s birth.
From his first collection, Poems—which was also the very first book legally published in Macedonian in a free and sovereign Macedonia in 1944—up to his last, Tree on the Hill, published in 1980, two years before his death, Aco Šopov laid the foundations of modern poetry rooted in his homeland, aspiring to place it on the global map. His work combines the poet’s personal experience, the fate of his country, and the shared destiny of humanity into a single intimate vision.
During his lifetime, Šopov published around twenty poetry books (twelve collections and eight selected works) and about ten in foreign languages. Since 1982, the number of selected poetry books in Macedonian and other languages has continued to grow, as has the number of studies devoted to him.
A connoisseur of the French language, he translated major French and Francophone authors into Macedonian, including Pierre Corneille, Edmond Rostand, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. In addition to numerous anthologies featuring his poems in French translation, two collections of his poetry have been published in France: En Chasse de ma voix (Éditions Saint-Germain-des-Prés) and Anthologie personnelle (Actes Sud).
On Saturday, July 12, as part of the Lyric Mill's Open Portal 2025, Nicole Huc and Gaëlle Lecoq paid tribute to him with their poetic and musical performance, “The Lyre and the Flute.”
As part of the 2026 edition, he is honored through the poetry performance “Senghor – Šopov: Intersecting Parallels”.