Grey Area – Skopioids
Motherland
“We started Grey Area to inspire skaters from this side of Europe, the eastern side.” Kuba Kaczmarczyk told me. “Of course I love the spots in western Europe as well, but I think they are quite played out, and also sometimes it feels like a competition. Because of this, I’ve chosen to go on the right side of the map, to the less-travelled areas.” For the past decade, Kuba and the Grey Area crew have ventured through countless eastern European countries (think Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, all over Poland, Hungary, Croatia, etc.) on a quest for underutilised granite and ex-Soviet crust, but one country had yet to be ticked off the list: Macedonia. Eniz Fazliov, one of the crew, is actually originally from there, but for reasons we’ll get into in this article, was always reluctant to plan a skate trip to his birthplace. Lucky for us, he finally relented, and the gang came back with the goods. To get a little insight into Eniz’s Macedonian roots, how a chance encounter with a rollerblader changed his mind about Skopje, and the full story of a few getting arrested for pushing it too far with security, continue reading our chat with Eniz and Rafski.
Photography by Rafal Wojnowski
Interview by Will Harmon
Will Harmon: Eniz, you were born in Macedonia right?
Eniz Fazliov: Yes, I was born there in 1987.
Will: And how old were you when you moved to Finland?
Eniz: I think it was the wintertime in ‘92. So I was four or five.
Eniz Fazliov, frontside boardslide
Will: Can you tell us why you left there?
Eniz: So for Macedonia and Yugoslavia… Those places were not doing really well with wars all around us. One of our family members was already living in Finland, and he actually worked at the immigration office, so he was like, “If you guys want to try to come here, I can help out once you’re here.” So it wasn’t like we just took a plane and we arrived in Helsinki, it was a bus ride to Poland, then to Hamburg, on to Copenhagen, and then to Sweden, up through Sweden to Lulea, where Simon Isaksson is from, and we lived there in some immigration place for a couple months. So after a few months in Lulea I don’t know how it actually went, if we really had papers ready or anything, or we just risked it, I’m not sure, but we just took a ferry from Lulea to this place called Vaasa in Finland, across the water, and that’s where our relative was. He was working at this immigration place there in Vaasa, so we moved there and he took us in.
Will: Do you have any memories of Macedonia from when you were a kid?
Eniz: Yes I do. We lived in a village, which was 10 kilometres from the capital city, Skopje. I have a memory of walking to my grandpa’s place, which was like one kilometre away, quite far away, and I was like three or four. That’s what I remember, just walking by myself there. I remember people had dogs in front of their houses… I just remember being super scared of the dogs when I would walk to my grandpa’s. And then there was this huge river that went through the village. And when I was back recently it was dry as fuck. There’s no water anymore, which is so crazy.
Franek Kramarczyk, gap to backside 50-50
Will: So most of your life you grew up in Finland with your family. And then at some point, your mother and your brother decided to move back to Macedonia, right?
Eniz: My mother moved after she retired a few years ago. We own some land next to our whole family, like my cousins and everybody’s just around us and then my mum just built this house. It was like over 50 years ago, yeah, at the time it was super cheap, like 12 grand, to build a whole house from the fucking ground up or whatever. And then after some years my brother Sadri started building his house across the street, as he got kicked out of Finland from doing just a lot of crimes and shit.
Will: Yeah, I was gonna ask you about him…
Eniz: This only happened seven years ago when he got kicked out. He was doing all this dodgy stuff and with the money that he was getting from that he built a house. He was going back and forth and just bringing cash there… Whatever, I‘m not gonna blow up his shit, but yeah, that’s what basically happened. And then he has this fucking huge house there, next to my mum’s, and he lives there, but every three months he’s allowed to come here (to Finland) because his family is here. He’s been there long enough now that I’m not even sure if he wants to ever come back. It’s a difficult situation.
Filip Dziewiecki, kickflip
Will: I bet… So you guys went on two Grey Area missions there to Skopje, one in November of last year, and then this past one in April. Eniz, Kuba said he’s been bugging you to do a Grey Area trip to Macedonia ever since he’s known you. Why were you hesitant for so long?
Eniz: There was a big gap that I didn’t go there for like, seven or eight years, and on that visit back then it kind of looked like there was something to skate in the centre, but I wasn’t sure. So I couldn’t just send a bunch of people there without knowing if there’s anything (to skate). So a year and a half ago I went there again with my girlfriend to visit my brother for his 40th birthday. I took one day to just cruise around with my board around the city, and I was like, “Oh, there’s fucking spots everywhere actually!” I took some photos with my phone and I thought it would be worth it to do a trip.
Will: I see…
Eniz: Before that, even back in the days when I was riding for Emerica, Percy [Dean] was always like, “Let’s go, let’s go!” But I was like, “Man, I can’t do it. I don’t even know if there’s one single spot.” And now that we went we managed to skate a lot of great spots, but I would say there was still a risk, on that first trip, just to see how it’s gonna go…
Tom Remillard, ollie in
Will: Did you think it might be sketchy all those years ago?
Eniz: I thought that too. There’s a river going through the city, and on one side it’s like the Muslim side, and the other side is the Christian side. So the other side is more like western style, and the Muslim side is more eastern style. There’s a big contrast between each side of the river. On the western side there were more spots, it was smoother and a lot of people were speaking English… But then on the other side… Well we didn’t really skate that much on the Muslim side, only this one fucking dream plaza and then a couple single spots. 95% of the time we stayed on the western side. We didn’t even have a car on the trip, so yeah, imagine if you did.
Filip Dziewiecki, wallie
Rafal Wojnowski: Yeah, there must be so much.
Eniz: There must be fucking so much. There’s a couple cities nearby too, like 30 kilometres away.
Will: Raf mentioned that you’d be out skating, and sometimes people would say stuff and only you could understand it because of the language. Was that stressful for you Eniz?
Eniz: Yeah, sometimes… One time I was skating this rail, and then we kind of snapped somebody’s lock… Some dude had locked the bike there, this shitty, really tiny lock. So we just touched it a little bit and it just opened. So we moved the bike a little bit back. Eventually the guy showed up at some point. This spot was on the Muslim side… So he started to freak out and it looked like I could understand everything in Albanian. “Look, they’ve broken my lock!” And I didn’t say anything, I was just using English…
Will: But you could understand what he was saying…
Eniz: Yeah, he was tripping on how the bike moved to the other end of the rail/bar.
Agata Halikowska, ollie in
Will: So what are the primary languages there in Macedonia?
Eniz: It’s like a Macedonian language and then Albanian language. Albanian is mostly spoken on the Muslim side and also Turkish. Turkish is playing a pretty big role there. So you can basically use Turkish, Albanian and Macedonian languages there.
Will: Raf, you told me the other day how surprised you were that so many people spoke English…
Eniz: The kids, remember? All the kids in the plaza…
Raf: All the kids… Even if you go to those little corner shops, like little booths, and there’s some old lady selling stuff, she speaks perfect English. Everyone spoke really good English, at least on the western side. That was very surprising in a way, because even if you go to some places in Spain or France no one speaks English…
Eniz Fazliov, frontside wallride
Will: In Skopje where you were, is there much of a skate scene?
Eniz: No, not really. Well the first time I went with my girlfriend, a year and a half ago, there were two skate shops. And one local, his name is Ilija, and he was kind of the main dude, like a legend, and he had a little skate shop slash bar, and then close by that bar/skate shop thing there was a proper skate shop called Drop In. So when I visited that first time, I went to both and I talked to them about everything there, about skating… And they were telling me that there’s probably only 20 skaters in the whole city. They even had this Copenhagen Open style of contest, like a street thing… The guy from the skate shop who was organising it told me that they had some cash to give away for tricks, like, a couple hundred, but none of the skaters could land anything, so they couldn’t even give it away.
Will: Haha, oh man…
Eniz: But I want to say on the first trip, when I was walking and pushing around, I met some rollerbladers in the main plaza. And I was like, “Hey, what’s up? I’m this guy, blah blah blah…” and introduced myself and explained that I wanted to know a little bit about the city. And there was one German rollerblader there, and he had a girlfriend from Macedonia, and he speaks really good English. He was telling me more about the city, and he promised me that it’s better than Barcelona. He told me that it’s almost guaranteed that we can do a trip there. He was like, “I’ve been to Barcelona many times. And trust me, this place is insane. There’s endless spots.” That’s why I was kind of pissed we didn’t have the car… Whoever goes there next with the car will probably see and skate so much more…
Michał “Dida” Zarzycki, backside 50-50
Will: What was the general reaction by the public to you guys skating?
Eniz: In this culture, there’s always one guy who comes out trying to… I don’t know, I feel like there’s always one dude that has a problem. I mean, I guess it’s everywhere, and then the security people… In Finland, for example, or Scandinavia, or anywhere, like in Germany, if the security person shows up, you can always play this game with them, like, going back and forth. But then, there, in Skopje, that doesn’t seem to really work.
Raf: Overall, it wasn’t too bad. I feel like skateboarding’s so new there, I think they didn’t really understand what we were doing… It was like, “Oh wow!” I was surprised that we were not being kicked out. And people would stop with kids and watch, and they were interested like, “What is this?”
Will: I saw that you guys went to an abandoned waterpark. Eniz, did you guys skate there before Raf got there?
Eniz: I didn’t go for the first time because… Well on the second trip, I came one or two days after everyone else. So the other guys had skated it once before, and then I was already like, “Oh shit, okay, this kind of spot…” I never was a big fan of going over the gates and just especially, in these kind of countries… And then I talked to my brother, he was basically saying, “If you don’t really want to skate it, if there’s nothing cool that you really want to hit, then don’t go. Unless there’s something you really want to skate there, just don’t go, because they will know by your name that you’re kind of local, and then you will have a bigger problem.”
Tom Remillard, backside melon
Will: Yeah for sure…
Eniz: The first time the guys skated it was before I arrived. The second time I kind of came in for a second. Then I had this fucking feeling inside of me that somebody was gonna come soon. But then I was like, “Okay, there’s nothing really to skate for me.” So I just left. There was a bar next to the stadium there, so I just had a couple beers and waited for the boys. There was Wi-Fi there and then somebody told me, they’d been kicked out and they have to fuck off. I was like, “Ah, there you go.” And then for the third time…
Will: Yeah, I wanna ask Raf about the third time back to the waterpark.
Raf: Okay first I need to talk about the end of the second time we skated there. That time at first we started skating the round slide, so you are a bit more hidden. Even though we made noise, you couldn’t see us, so we thought that hopefully no one would kick us out. And we were there for ages, so everyone got a bit more comfortable with being there. And then a couple of people left and we tried to skate the big slide into the vertical wall. That’s when we were fully exposed. Everyone started shouting and skating down, and people walking around could see us, and I was like, “That’s not good. We’re making a bit too much noise about it…” but we still had like an hour. I thought, “Okay, maybe it’s just fine. Maybe nothing’s gonna happen.” And then Tom [Remillard] tried to skate it, and got pretty close to what he was trying to do, and then out of nowhere there were like six guys that surrounded us, and they were like, “You need to leave!” And they held the gate that we’d opened and were like, “You’re not leaving. Police is coming.” So we just managed to talk them out of it. We were just like, “Come on, it’s fine, we’re never gonna come back. Just let us go. We’re never gonna come back…”
Andrzej Palenica, ollie
Will: “We’re tourists!”
Raf: Yeah, and so they said, “If you’re never gonna come back. It’s fine.” and they let us go. So we took two or three days off. We were like, “Let them forget about us, and then we could come back.”
Will: “Maybe they won’t remember in three days.” Classic skateboarder mentality, haha.
Raf: Tom was just like, “It’s too good of a spot. I need to come back for it.” And I wanted to shoot one more photo as well. And we were just like, “Fuck it. Let’s just go early in the morning, just the three of us. It’s gonna be quick, you know, all good.” So a few days later we went back a third time. It was early in the morning, Tom was on his own skating it, Kuba and I shooting, and he couldn’t get hyped to skate the big slide. So Tom’s warming up, it took a bit of time, and I think they saw us there pretty much straight away. So they must have planned it, because, honestly, they surrounded the whole area, the whole water park. There were people on every exit, all around this water park. And then they just showed up, being like, “Police is coming.” They surrounded every exit, we couldn’t run… But I was still thinking, okay, we can probably run away somehow. You know there’s going to be a way to get out. So I grab my stuff and start running out, because I knew that they must have come in from somewhere, there must be an exit. So I start running and one guy is chasing me. I ran out of the whole complex of that waterpark, and some pedestrian was walking, and these guys were like, “Stop him. Stop him!” They’re getting in my way and then a police van just pulled up from around the corner, and they blocked me. I was like, okay, yeah, that’s it. I can’t run anymore. So they got me, and then I came back and I saw Tom and Kuba were with the police already. They gave me a look like: “Okay, we are in trouble.” That’s not gonna be good I thought. The security guys were like, “You said you’d never gonna come back, and you came back. You lied to us.”
Will: “We thought you’d forget!” Haha…
Raf: Yeah, haha. And I think the main problem there was that we were trespassing. And apparently, that waterpark is under the city council, so it’s owned by the city, not a private business. They said it’s like a national whatever ground and we are trespassing on this national property, and that’s treated differently than private ones. They were like, “Oh, you are actually breaking the law on a higher level, you know?” They’re like, “We need to treat it more seriously.” And we were like, “Wow, okay, that’s not sounding good.” And we started freaking out a bit. Everyone there was really angry…
Eniz Fazliov, ollie over the bench to backside 5-0
Will: And you’re where now? Just in the car park of the waterpark?
Raf: Yeah, and honestly, it was so funny, because it was like six or eight security people, and then it was like four policemen, and then another police car pulled up, another four and then another car pulled up, and there’s like, some higher ups coming. At some point there was like 20 people there. We thought: “This must be the biggest case in the city right now.”
Will: You guys must have been shitting yourselves.
Raf: And we were thinking, because I’m not sure what it is, maybe Eniz would know more, but they seem to really love America over there, and they’ve got the biggest, or like second biggest American embassy in the world. America is seen as maybe something quite big, so we were thinking, like, “Oh, we’ve got Tom, yeah, they’re gonna let us go because look, he’s American!” Like, maybe we’re gonna talk them out of it we thought… But, yeah, it was not helping us at all.
Will: So what did they do next?
Raf: So at that point, we were waiting there for like an hour because they didn’t know what to do with us, basically. So we just sit in this car park and they all talk in between each other. Bringing in different people, and that was the funny part, no one speaks English.
Eniz: I mean everybody, everywhere else is speaking English, but, yeah, not the police.
Michał “Dida” Zarzycki, ollie
Raf: Macedonian has some similarities with the Polish language, so we could understand a little bit. So over the hour of waiting we started picking up some bits. They were talking about ‘deleting all the photos’ and ‘confiscating our camera’, and then ‘deportation’. And we were like, “Oh my god…” Finally they brought some young, new police guy. He was like, 21, could speak English, and he was translating for them. I think it was just the security guys that were so pissed off that we lied to them about not coming back, that they were pushing the police to do it. The police were like, “Okay, yeah, we’ll think about it.” But it got us stressing… I was like, “Oh no, I need to get my memory card. I’m not losing these photos.” So I pretended I was taking water from my bag and managed to get the cards out of the cameras and put them in my pocket. And then I told Kuba he needed to do the same. I started covering him with Tom and we stood in front of Kuba’s camera bag so he could take his card out of the camera and hide it somewhere. So we managed to get a card out. We were like, “Okay good, that’s secure.” And then they said, “We’re gonna have to go to your place to get your passports,” and we’re like, fuck there’s weed in the house, so I quickly text the guys, “Take all the weed out. Leave the apartment, clean up, we’re coming with the police.”
Will: Were you one of those people that got that text Eniz?
Eniz: No, because we had two different apartments. I guess I was in the non-weed apartment, because I’m not really smoking anymore, it wasn’t my deal.
Will: So did the other guys take you seriously Raf? Or did they think it was a joke or something when they got your text?
Raf: I think at first everyone thought it was a joke. Basically we went there so early that the guys said they were thinking that we were just trying to get them out of the apartment, to get up and go skate. Like, “Here’s the police. You need to leave.” haha. No one took it seriously at first, and then we just started panicking, like, “No, no, you need to go now!” It took forever just to even leave that car park, and then they said, “Okay, you need to go to the station. We need to take all your details and you’re going to be prosecuted.” And we thought it’s going to happen that day. So they put us in a tiny police car, and the funny part is, like, no one wears their seat belts there. So even the police had those dummy seat belt clickers… I was like, “Oh, no, seat belts. And he’s like, “Huh, yeah.” And they drove us to the station. We just sat there for ages. It was three, four hours maybe, just waiting for them basically to take our details. It was a pretty rundown place. There was no light in the toilet…
Andrzej Palenica, backside lipslide
Will: So wait, were you in a cell?
Raf: No, it wasn’t like a cell. We basically roamed around the whole station, and we went to the cells for lunch. It was like an interrogation room, I would say. We were just sitting there for hours and hours waiting for them, and so Kuba went to the toilet and there was no light, so he used his torch on his phone to just see where he’s going, and they thought he was filming. They stormed in, saying, “What are you doing? You can’t film here! Give me your phone!” And they grabbed his phone and started looking if he’d taken any photos, but he hadn’t. So he’s like, “No, no, I’m just using my light.” But at that same time when Kuba was in the toilet, Tom started taking some photos of me sitting in a cell. So he’s like, “Fuck, I need to delete them.” And the guy comes to Tom, like, “Give me your phone.” And Tom is quickly deleting them from his phone. And then the guy is like, “Oh, go to the recently deleted folder.” And I was like, “Oh my god…” So Tom goes there, but you need to unlock it with your face. The folder opens and he quickly deletes the pics. That was really close.
Will: Wow, scary.
Raf: Then they took all of our phones, so we were just sitting there no phone, no nothing. And we told the other guys before, “We are at a police station, we don’t know how long it’s gonna take. Take all the weed and leave.” And then it was like, three or four hours of just waiting. And then they were like, “Oh, we need to go to your apartment, get the passports, so you can’t leave the country.” Because it was like 6pm or maybe seven, they were like, “Yeah, courts are closed now, so we can’t prosecute you today.”
Will: Because they kept you all fucking day, right?
Raf: Yeah. They were like, “Oh, you need to come back tomorrow morning and you’re gonna get prosecuted.” So they drove us to the apartments and Eniz met us with the keys and we got our passports. They were treating it quite seriously. They would follow us everywhere and surround us, you know? They were thinking we were gonna run or something.
Will: Once they took your passports, what happened then? You’re kind of fucked without your passport…
Raf: So then we had to show up next morning for the case. But they were like, “Oh, you need to come to the station.” We’re like, “Why not straight to the court?” They’re like, “No, no, station first.” So we go to the station, wait for them, because the first day we didn’t go to court because they didn’t have a car. Like, “We need to wait for the car.” And it was four hours waiting. They’re like, “We still don’t have a car to take you there.”
Filip Dziewiecki, ollie
Eniz: Why didn’t they drag you to your apartment to get the passports right away? Why not first thing? I don’t get this.
Raf: It was weird. And then, the next morning, they got the car, or rather a van, and when they opened the back it’s just like a metal box with no windows. We were like, “Are you serious?” The van had these scary bars too, so we got in and then they started driving us around for like 20 minutes, then half an hour… We were like, “But the court is just five minutes from the station. Why are we driving for so long?” And the back of the police van had a super slippery floor. I don’t know what they put there, but it’s like they were driving us around, and we were just flying around in the back, bouncing off the walls. We’re like, “What is going on?”
Will: They were trying to rough you up!
Raf: I think they were really trying to fuck with us, show us their power, you know? We were like, “Are they going to McDonald’s or something?” And then finally we got to the court and we got a fine. It was 320 euros each, which is kind of a lot.
Will: Yeah, I wonder how they came up with that figure.
Raf: When we were at the station, the main guy, I can’t remember exactly, but he was like, “Oh, it’s gonna be like 100 euros, max.” Okay sucks, but sure, we can do this. And then the judge, she came up with 320, and yeah, that’s quite a lot. I don’t know how they decided on that, but Eniz was saying it is quite corrupt there. So we were like, “Are they gonna just split it?” Because I think the average salary is like 250 euros a month.
Eniz: It’s like three to 400 maybe. But the cops probably get 500 a month.
Raf: So yeah, we could see when we were taking the cash out the cash machine, the police were looking at us, like, “Wow, that’s a lot of money.”
Will: “This is gonna line our pockets great.”
Raf: Yeah! So they put us back in the van, no lights this time, so it’s completely pitch black. We’re just bouncing around in there again, going from one place to the other. Drive to get the cash, back in the van, go to the post office to pay the fine… Really making a point that we are criminals, you know? Back in the van again to the court and give them some proof of payment, and then they let us go. So yeah, it was another half of the day gone on, just dealing with this. So yeah, it took quite a lot of time out of our trip.
Issue 61 cover: Tom Remillard, frontside grind yank-out, Skopje. Ph. Rafal Wojnowski
Will: Was it all worth it though? You got some photos of Tom there in the end…
Raf: I mean, it is a lot of money. But I really wanted to come back with something from that spot because, yeah, it was just too good. I didn’t want to come back empty handed.
Eniz: I’m glad you managed to get something out of it. You know, imagine if you weren’t able to get any photos from all of that.
Raf: Exactly, it worked out in the end.
Will: Raf I remember you telling me how sick it was to have Eniz’s brother there.
Raf: He definitely was a big part of both of those trips. Everyone was like, “Oh, Sadri is just a legend here.”
Eniz: I mean, he told me he fucking loved it. He was like, “Next time you come with the Volcom crew and then you come with the Nike crew, etc.” He was getting all excited about the next trips… He has a lot of friends there too, but it’s just a little bit lonely there he told me. And there’s nothing really to do, he just hangs out, so every time we were there, like, both times he was just so excited. He was hyped to stop people, stop cars, he was so on it every time, like just getting people beers and waters and snacks. You could tell he was so excited to just do something.
Andrzej Palenica, kickflip
Raf: He made it so fun, and helped everyone, it was amazing.
Eniz: We were supposed to go on slightly earlier dates on the second trip, but I talked to Kuba and told him my brother would be in Finland at that time. And then Kuba was like, “Oh no, we cannot go there if your brother is not there. He was such a big part of the trip.” So we changed the dates and he was super stoked. Both trips he was just so hyped, and definitely a big help.
Will: So do you guys think Skopje will become a new, popular destination for skate trips?
Eniz: I mean, hopefully… I’m gonna be jealous if some other team goes there without me though!
Raf: I would say yeah, go there, because it’s so cheap there right now that it definitely helps to make a skate trip possible. And for me, I was saving money by being there, because London is so expensive. So it was cheaper for me to be on his trip than to be at home, haha. So I would say, if someone wants to go, you can go for a longer time. You can go for two weeks, and it wouldn’t cost you crazy money. And then yeah, if you’re gonna have a car, you can explore way more. You could make it really good.
Will: Just avoid the waterparks.
Raf: Yes, haha… There’s no need to bother, that idea has been exhausted.
