Dusko Aleksovski

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Dr. Dusko Aleksovski (Macedonia: Доктор Душко Алексовски, Latinic: Doktor Duško Aleksovski) is a Macedonian researcher. Born in 1948 in the village Topolovik, Kratosko about eight kilometers west of the town Kratovo. He completed his graduate studies in Skopje and received his doctorate in Philology in France after which he taught French and Latin at a High School in Kratovo.

Dr. Aleksovski's first exposure to rock art was in 1987 in Switzerland after which it became his passion. Soon after his return to Macedonia, he began to scour the Macedonian countryside looking for samples. And samples he did find.

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Since he first started in 1988 until now, Dr. Aleksovski has found and recorded more than one million samples in Macedonia alone.

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It is estimated that the Republic of Macedonia has more rock art samples than the entire region of Europe. Dr. Aleksovski believes that all elements were present and the conditions were right for a prehistoric civilization to have flourished in this region. According to the latest dating methods, some of the art on the rock samples is over thirty thousand years old. Dr. Aleksovski's discoveries have attracted a lot of attention in the rock art world, enough to call the Republic of Macedonia the Rock Art center of the world, to hold a Rock Art World Congress in 2002 in Macedonia, to form a Rock Art Academy and to elect Dr. Aleksovski its first president. Among the participants in the Rock Art Congress were France, Switzerland, USA, Japan, China, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Italy, Greece, Great Britain, Australia, Russia and, of course, Macedonia.

Although being happy that Greece referred to Macedonia by its constitutional name during the congress, Dr. Aleksovski was disappointed and dismayed to find that he had become a Greek overnight. After forming their own Rock Art Academy in Volos, the Greeks claimed Dr. Aleksovski as their own. He showed me the English version of the Volos announcement with his name "Dusko Aleksovski, Greece." Who is stealing what from whom here?

I asked Dr. Aleksovski if any of the rock inscriptions were translated and what do they mean? He believes that the inscriptions were written by a certain class of people with special skills and the art patterns may represent events that had to do with births, deaths and perhaps astrology. So far however, none of the pictorial patterns have been successfully translated. On the positive side however, over four thousand year old patterns found on remote rocks were also found in ordinary hand woven fabrics existing today in practically every village of Macedonia. No one seems to know what the patterns mean but their design is preserved on Macedonian hand woven fabrics from generation to generation.

Dr. Aleksovski delivered the lecture with energy and passion and I for one was glad to be there. He showed the audience over one hundred and sixty slides of rock art samples and if he had it his way, he would have brought the actual samples with him, but he would have needed a ship to transport them since some of them weigh tons.

The Toronto audience was also treated to slides from the copper book from Alexander the Great's time. What was most intriguing about this book is the number of languages written on it. One would think that during and after Alexander's time, the only languages in use would be Koine and Latin, but according to the inscriptions, that is not so. The earlier pages had writings from more ancient languages. Some of the characters, according to Dr. Aleksovski, resembled those of the Macedonian Glagolic script.