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Aco Šopov’s live and work in the 1940s
1940: Aco Šopov writes his first collection of socially inspired poetry, which disappears, along with other clandestine documents, in a police raid, during the occupation.
1941: He becomes a member of the Yugoslav Communist Youth.
1942: With two high school mates, he publishes the newspaper Spark clandestinely.
1943: He gets his high school certificate in his home town and joins the Partisan resistance in the mountains.
1944: He publishes the newspaper of the Third Macedonian Shock Brigade, Fire, in which his war poems appear. At the end of the year, his first book, Poems, is published. Poems is the very first book to appear legally in the Macedonian language, in a free and sovereign Macedonia.
1945: Appointed Vice-President of the National Liberation Youth Union of Macedonia (NOMSM). First trip to the USSR as a member of a Yugoslav youth delegation. Editor-in-chief of The Young Combatant, a youth newspaper. Launch of the arts, science and social sciences magazine Nov Den (New Day), of which Šopov is one of the editors and later the editor-in-chief; it lasts until 1950.
1946: Graduates from the Đuro Đaković High School of the Party, in Belgrade. Participates in the First Congress of Yugoslav Writers, as a member of the Nominating Committee and the Supervisory Board. Publication of the collection The Youth Railway, co-written with Slavko Janevski, during their participation in the construction of the first railway in Yugoslavia after the Second World War, the “Brčko Banovići Youth Railway”. A thousand foreign youth participated in it, alongside more than sixty thousand Yugoslavs.
1947: Šopov becomes one of the eight founding members of the Society of Writers of Macedonia, which he will chair several times.
1948: Birth of his son Vladimir, from his marriage to Blagorodna.
© Aco Šopov – Poesis
