The City of Skopje has published a public call to subsidise endangered crafts - those whose trades, according to processed data, show a continuous decline in activity.

Eligible are craftspeople resident in the City of Skopje area, from the municipalities of Aerodrom, Gazi Baba, Butel, Čair, Ǵorče Petrov, Karpoš, Kisela Voda, Saraj, Centar and Šuto Orizari. There are three conditions: meeting the criteria in the call and submitting the full documentation, not having used City of Skopje funds in the current year, and being registered under the Crafts Law or holding a craft licence.

Mayor Orce Ǵorǵievski frames the measure this way: „With this measure we are giving concrete support to the people who, through their work, knowledge and dedication, preserve the authenticity of Skopje. Let us not allow the old crafts to remain only a memory of the past.”

Endangered means we have already lost

The word „endangered” in this call is not an administrative label. It means the trade is shrinking - that there are fewer people doing it than the city needs. In other words, this is not a development measure. This is a retention measure.

Crafts in Skopje are not dying out for lack of love for tradition. They are dying out because young people don't go into them, and they don't go into them because the income is unstable, the work is physically hard and nobody guarantees there will be a market in ten years. The subsidy addresses cash flow. It does not address the transfer of knowledge.

The question left outside the call

Ǵorǵievski says it is our shared obligation to create conditions for these skills to keep living in future generations. That is the right goal. But the call is aimed at craftspeople already working - not at someone who wants to learn a trade.

If the measure helps a master keep the workshop open for another year, that is good and worth doing. If after that year there is nobody to hand it to, in two years the same call will count even fewer applicants. That is the arithmetic of every list of endangered crafts - and it is not solved with one-off funds.

Those who want to apply should check the conditions and deadlines on the official City of Skopje website. Those wondering why the list gets shorter every year will have to wait for a measure that starts with the apprentice, not the master.