“The Road I walk”

“I am one of those poets who remain true to themselves from their first steps in poetry to their creative maturity,’ Aco Šopov declared in an interview with Nenad Radanović in 1978. ‘No literary wind has diverted me from the road I walk on,” he said, before concluding: “The poet is known by his poem, not by the signature he puts on it.”

You are at the starting point of this road Šopov walked on for four decades. 

Aco Šopov was born on 23 December 1923 in Štip, at a time when Macedonia was an integral part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1930, he enrolled at primary school in his hometown. At the age of fourteen, he wrote his first poems in Serbian, due to historical conditions. Encouraged by the publication of Kočo Racin's White Dawns, one of the first three collections published in Macedonian language outside the national borders, Šopov wrote a complete collection of poems in Macedonian, at the age of seventeen. This handwritten collection, entitled Poems on Štip, best known as “The Caravanserais”,  the title of its key poem, disappeared in the whirlwind of the Second World War, but Šopov continued walking on his road in poetry:

• In the 1940s
• In the 1950s
• In the 1960s
• In the 1970s