What has left after an earthquake
Co zbyde po zemĕtřesení
In 1963 Skopje has experienced a horror... On July 26 Skopje was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake of 6.1 magnitude, which killed over 1,070 people, injured between 3,000 and 4,000 and left more than 200,000 people homeless. About 80 percent of the city was destroyed.
Within days after the earthquake took place, 35 nations requested that the United Nations General Assembly place relief for Skopje on their list of agendas. Relief, in the form of money, medical, engineering and building teams and supplies was offered from 78 countries.
The then-United States president John F. Kennedy ordered the Department of Defense and the Agency for International Development (USAID) to take actions for disaster assistance in Skopje by sending personnel, prefabricated houses, tent citiesand other forms of relief. Large amount of relief also arrived from the Soviet Union. Its leader, Nikita Khrushchev, visited Skopje personally. As the SFR Yugoslavia was a member of the Non Aligned Movement during the Cold War, the American and Soviet troops stationed in Skopje could freely shake hands for the first time since their historical encounter on Elbe in 1945.
The first foreign journalist who arrived in Skopje to report on the earthquake was David Binder of the New York Times. As he watched Skopje from the plane, he commented that the city looked like it was bombed.
What has left?
A symbol of the earthquake in 1963 in Skopje is the Old Railway Station. Today this building is Skopje City Museum. The Old Railway Station stands half ruined as a monument to the earthquake. It was built in 1938 by Velimir Gavrilovik in a modern style with Byzantine decoration. The clock at the railway station building stopped at 5.17 on July 26, 1963, at the very moment of the earthquake, and still stands on the wall.
The Old railway station before the earthquake
Following the earthquake, Josip Broz Tito, then-president of SFR Yugoslavia, sent a message of condolences to the Socialist Republic of Macedonia before visiting the city personally: “Together with all the peoples of Yugoslavia we will endeavour to mitigate the misfortune that has befallen your republic”.
Alberto Moravia, one of the leading Italian novelists: “Skopje must not remain merely a newspaper report of its first sufferings, but must be the responsibility of all of us, of all men who today or tomorrow, through some similar new catastrophe, may become Skopians”..
Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the leading figures of the French philosophy and literature: “Skopje is not a film, not a thriller where we guess the chief event. It is a concentration of man’s struggle for freedom, with a result which inspires further struggles and no acceptance of defeat”.
The Old railway station after the earthquake
Geocachers from all over the world, thank you for being in solidarity with Skopje!
The cache is only a logbook, wrapped in plastic bag as a thin envelop. Bring your pen.
Sources: Wikipedia, other internet sources. Photos: Internet, Original (by Galejnik)