Šuto Orizari at 30: A Roma Community Makes Its Own History

This September, the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) travels to Skopje to mark 30 years of Šuto Orizari. In partnership with the Municipality, ERIAC presents Mashkari Amende (Among Us), a community and music festival celebrating three decades since Šuto Orizari became a municipality in its own right, and the Roma knowledge, agency and creative practice that have defined its public life ever since.

The festival opened on 11 September with a Community Day of textile, theatre and Romani storytelling workshops for the children and teenagers of Šutka, and returns on 27 September 2026 with an evening of live music on the Municipality Square. Yet the history it honours began long before 1996. It is the story of a community that grew into one of the most distinctive centres of Roma culture in Europe.

From disaster to a home of its own

The modern history of Šuto Orizari is closely connected to one of the defining events in Skopje’s history: the catastrophic earthquake of 26 July 1963. Among the areas badly affected was Topaana, a predominantly Roma settlement whose residents lost their homes. In the months that followed, people were forced to live in improvised tents while the city began rebuilding. As part of the reconstruction, people whose homes had been destroyed were provided with land on which they could build new houses, while others received ready-made, pre-planned housing.

Better living conditions attracted Roma families from Skopje and surrounding areas, and Šuto Orizari grew rapidly. What had emerged from displacement and reconstruction was becoming one of the largest Roma settlements in the region.

Spaces to create and belong

It wasn’t long before the community began building spaces of its own. The “26 July” primary school opened in 1965, initially inside the barracks themselves, followed by the “Braća Ramiz and Hamid” Education Centre in 1971, which became a full primary school in 1976. Ajša Bajram and Rakipi Nurija were its first Roma educators.

In the 1970s, the Cultural and Artistic Society Phralipe, the Roma theatre of the same name, and the “26 July” cinema all began operating in the settlement. The Romani language itself flourished here in its many local forms: the Topaanski, Barutčiski, Gilanski, Džambaski and Kovački speeches, each carried by a different community that had settled in Šuto Orizari from Skopje, Kosovo, Serbia and elsewhere.

As Europe’s first Roma-majority municipality, Šuto Orizari became a source of pride and empowerment. It launched the world’s first official newspaper published in both Romani and Macedonian, marking the first time official documents appeared in the Romani language. Šuto Orizari also built its own media. TV Šutel was founded and based in the municipality. It was not the first Roma television station in Macedonia, but it was the first to come from Šutka itself. It broadcast news and cultural programmes in Romani, made by Roma journalists. It also became part of everyday life in the neighbourhood: residents sent in videos of weddings, birthdays and graduations, which went on air as greetings to family and neighbours. For many households, TV Šutel was where they heard their own language on screen and saw their own community’s celebrations reflected back to them.

A symbol of Roma self-determination

On 12 September 1996, Šuto Orizari was granted municipal status alongside Gorno Orizari and Dolno Orizari, a milestone that gave a Roma-majority community, for the first time, an institutional framework to govern its own public life. Thirty years on, it remains the only municipality in North Macedonia, and one of very few in the world, where Roma shape local government from within, and the only local authority anywhere to have adopted Romani as an official language.

Its census figures tell the story of a plural, evolving community. In 2002, Roma made up 61% of 22,017 residents; by 2021, the population had grown to 25,726, with Roma at 43.8% alongside a growing Albanian community and smaller Macedonian, Turkish, Bosniak and Serbian populations. Within the Roma community itself, families of Arli, Topaanlii, Gilanlii, Barutchii and other backgrounds, some rooted in Skopje for generations, others who arrived from Kosovo and Serbia, have built, street by street, a shared civic life out of distinct histories.

A cultural legacy

Theatre was among the first forms of Roma cultural life to take root in Šuto Orizari. A group of young enthusiasts formed an association that became the Cultural and Artistic Society Phralipe, and in 1970 Rahim Burhan founded Roma Theatre Pralipe. The company performed only in Romani and was the world’s first professional Romani-language theatre. It toured widely in Europe, including the Nancy Theatre Festival in France and the Delphi festival in Greece, where it staged Oedipus Rex, and it later moved to Germany. In Macedonia and abroad, Pralipe was for many years the best-known name in Roma theatre. In Šutka, former members set up the Student Theatre in the 1980s, and by the mid-1990s several amateur groups had followed.

Around the same time, poet and songwriter Muzafer Bislim was doing something just as ambitious in a quieter register: translating his own poems from Serbo-Croatian into Romani, composing directly in his mother tongue, and spending more than three decades hand-compiling a multi-dialect Romani dictionary of some 25,000 words. This work eventually carried him to the International Poetry Biennial near Paris and into a documentary, Flames of God, about a life spent keeping a language alive.

If theatre and poetry gave Šuto Orizari’s culture its words, Esma Redžepova (1943–2016) gave it a voice the whole world heard. She was born in Topaana, the old Romani neighbourhood of Skopje whose families brought the Topaanski dialect to Šutka. She became the first Romani musician in Yugoslavia to perform and record in Romani for mass audiences, and the first Macedonian woman to appear on television. Over more than fifty years she gave thousands of concerts across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia, many of them for humanitarian causes, playing everywhere from village squares to stadiums and opera houses, for audiences that included world leaders. She recorded more than 500 songs, several of which went gold in the former Yugoslavia. In 1976 she was crowned “Queen of Romani Music” at the World Romani Congress in India, and US National Public Radio later named her one of the world’s “50 Great Voices”. Like Pralipe and Muzafer Bislim, she carried Romani language and culture from the neighbourhoods of Skopje to international stages.

Muharem Serbezovski (b. 1950) was also born in Topaana, and Šutka still counts him as one of its own. He began singing in the 1960s and released his first album at just 12. He became one of the most popular Romani singers in Yugoslavia, with wide success in the 1970s and 1980s. Across 12 albums and 22 singles and EPs, he built on Romani music and blended it with other styles, especially Turkish music. From the 1980s he also made his name as a writer and translator. He wrote several books, translated the Quran into Romani and contributed to work on a Romani-language dictionary. He is also known for his Romani activism, and in the 2000s he served a term in the parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he now lives.

Each generation in Šutka has found its own way to make music. For those who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, it was hip hop. Shutka Roma Rap began with Mendo Selman, a brass musician who plays at weddings. He started bringing rappers on stage with his band because, as he put it, “the young people like it.” The collective grew out of the 2010 compilation I Shutka Tani Mo Than (Shutka My Hometown). It featured rappers including Al-Alion, Kemp, Error, Fet Joe and Ne-Li, and reached number 15 on the World Music Charts Europe. Mixing rap with the brass sound of Šutka’s wedding bands, the group released the album Me Sijum Underground on the Hungarian label Fonó Records in 2013. It went on to perform at festivals in Hungary, Denmark and elsewhere. For many who grew up in Šutka in the 1990s and 2000s, Shutka Roma Rap showed that the neighbourhood’s musical traditions could speak in the language of their own generation.

Mashkari Amende continues this legacy of community-driven cultural production, and deliberately extends it to a new generation of participants and artists. On 27 September, from 18:00 at the Municipality Square, the musical programme opens with Roma Rock School Band, a group of young Roma musicians from Šuto Orizari. Next, the acclaimed Roma Macedonian multi-instrumentalist Bajsa Arifovska takes the stage, accompanied by Friends: Damir Imeri on piano and keyboards, Ivan Bejkov on bass, Ratko Dautovski on percussion, Zlatko Madevski on accordion and Dushko Georgievski on vocals. Gipsy Groove from Kosovo keeps the momentum going with traditional Roma music charged with Balkan ska and reggae. DJ Bate will carry the party late into the night.

Mashkari Amende (Among Us) is organised by ERIAC in partnership with the Municipality of Šuto Orizari. Thirty years after the establishment of its municipal status, Šuto Orizari stands as an example of what communities can achieve when granted the space, recognition and institutions to determine their own future.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Daniel Petrovski and Sevdija Abdulova for generously sharing their research with us, which provided an important foundation for this article.

Cover photo: Young girls from Šuto Orizari in traditional Roma dress. Šuto Orizari, Skopje, 1967. Photo by Elsie Dunin. Courtesy of Daniel Petrovski.