Martin Trenevski, a former minister, ambassador and journalist, has passed away - one of the rare personalities who moved through almost every institutional role in the first years of independent Macedonia and still stayed in collective memory. The family announced the news; the funeral will be on 27 May at 13:00 at the Butel City Cemetery.

Trenevski was born in 1949 in Skopje. He graduated in English language and literature at the „Ss. Cyril and Methodius" Faculty of Philology, and earned a master's in political science. He started his journalistic career with pieces in daily, weekly and monthly outlets in Skopje. He reached the professional peak of his journalism at the then-agency TANJUG, where in 1986 he was named correspondent for Australia and the South Pacific.

That is where Trenevski did what only a small group of Macedonian journalists managed: he followed and gave voice to the Macedonian community in a far-flung part of the diaspora. At a time when Macedonian emigration in Australia was politically intercepted - with Greek lobby-group pressure on Australian authorities, and a fight for identity and self-determination - his dispatches were a bridge to the homeland.

After Macedonia's independence, Trenevski served as the Minister of Information in the first government, and later as Minister in the Ministry of Emigration. As ambassador, he represented Macedonia in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, served as Consul General in Toronto, and as ambassador to NATO. That is a portfolio few diplomats hold - both the northern Scandinavian countries and NATO during the critical pre-accession phase.

Politically, Trenevski was a member and activist of VMRO-DPMNE from the party's earliest days. That matters for context: he was not an „independent expert" but part of the political current that shaped Macedonia in the first two decades. For his work as journalist, publicist and diplomat he received several domestic and international awards, the most prestigious being „Mito Hadzivasilev-Jasmin" in 1983.

What remains of a generation that is leaving us? Trenevski was part of a generation that had two careers - under Yugoslavia, and under independent Macedonia. Those people understood the transition not as a textbook concept but as their own life. Without that generation, the understanding of Macedonia's 30 years is significantly thinner. Rest in peace.