In the early morning hours of 8 June, at the age of 60, Arsim Zekoli passed away - a former ambassador, columnist and one of the sharpest political analysts in this country. The news was announced by his brother, Dr. Shefket Zekoli, and the funeral was held the same day at the cemetery in the village of Blace.

Zekoli's biography (1966-2026) is hard to compress into a single sentence: a diplomat who led Macedonia's Permanent Mission to the OSCE in Vienna until January 2009, also an ambassador to Turkmenistan, and before and after diplomacy - a journalist, art historian, translator and humanitarian activist. A man with several lives in one.

But his widest mark was left as a voice in public life. His analyses were sharp, direct and critical - and that toward everyone, regardless of camp. He wrote and spoke about democracy, about inter-ethnic relations, about corruption, about the influence of great powers in the Balkans - always tying the domestic to the regional and the global. In a media space where analysis is often party service with an academic title, Zekoli was among the rare ones who owed nothing to anyone.

Voices like this are measured not by how often they're quoted, but by the void they leave behind. Public debate in Macedonia is poorer today by one participant who knew how to speak an unpopular truth in both Macedonian and Albanian - and to speak it the same way in both.