SAY Zdravo if you meet any Macedonians today. Zdravo is the Macedonian for hello. Not many people know that (except, of course, in Macedonia). I know, because I was in Macedonia on my holidays the week before last.
I was on Lake Ohrid, in the south west of the country, for the simple reason that the poet Paul Durcan once remarked to my friend and myself that Ohrid is one of the most beautiful places in Europe. He'd been there at a poetry festival.
Poetry, however, is not what Macedonia associates with Ireland at the moment: Fotbol! is what everyone was saying recently to the Irish visitor. Fotbol!
Getting to this little country, buried in the heart of the Balkans, was complicated by the claims of its dominant neighbour that it doesn't exist. Greece won't use the name Macedonia. Or - at least - it won't use it to describe the country we are playing fotbol against today.
The Greeks insist that the name Macedonia refers only to their ancient, northernmost province, where Alexander the Great came from. They call our fotbolling friends' place, when they call it anything at all, FYROM. And that is how it is shown on contemporary maps: FYROM, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
As such, it is doing a lot better than other former Yugoslav republics. Belgrade let it go without a struggle, and so the newly independent republic has buses and international trains and automatic banking, not to mention a mixed population, some of them Muslims looking to Turkey or Bulgaria, most of them Slav Christians, who seem to get along reasonably well.
In Ohrid, the poorest people - washing carpets on the banks of a river, or carrying loads of brick - came from across the lake, from Albania. Compared to that destitute country, Macedonia is wonderfully prosperous.
But Macedonians, like the Irish, know all about emigration and remittances. "We love our country," some locally-born tourists said, chatting in the little park in the medieval citadel above Ohrid. "But we've had jobs in Sweden for 18 years. We'll never come back here, now."
But FYROM is a proud place. Its stunning cultural heritage of churches and frescoes and icons, from the centuries when Ohrid was the heart of a great Slav missionary empire, is under UNESCO protection. It also has landscapes of untamed natural beauty: there are bears still in the great wooded mountains that stretch towards Greece.
The Ohrid trout is delicious, the local soups are wonderful, a single Macedonian sausage would feed a family, there are fruit-laden trees everywhere, wine is cheap, people offer you little cups of coffee and glasses of devastating spirits all the time, and, in the mornings, the men go out to kiosks for a bottle of yoghurt and a fresh cheese pie, which is one of the great breakfasts.
This excellent cuisine, we will have to hope, will not have too good an influence on Macedonia's footballing skills. On the other hand, it will be much appreciated when the Irish descend on Skopje for the return bout.
Blagodaram, it might be as well to start practising saying, now. Particularly if Macedonia loses by a good number of goals today. Say blagodaram, politely. It means thank you.
