Banica 3

Last week I again went to Banica with several others and I thought I'd take the opportunity to say something about the place.

It is known in Macedonia as a rather lawless place, and I heard that even the police were reluctant to go there. People from Banica travel throughout Macedonia as they take produce to sell (the villages around Strumica, or which Banica is one, have very fertile ground), and it is not uncommon to find them in Skopje in the summer, even though it is a long drive (it takes us about 2 hours or more each way).

In the village there are side roads of mud, and as we drive through there are always lots of people standing by or walking down the road. People with horse and carts go past and stray dogs are in the streets (although that's quite usual here in Skopje too!).

The people themselves are generally fairly darked skinned, and their ethnic roots are not clear to me - some say they are from Egypt (note that Cleopatra was descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals), someone else said Kazakhstan, or some similar area. They generally have Macedonian names, and speak only Macedonian, unlike other ethnic groups like the Roma (to whom they look similar).

Until last year they had no evangelical church in the village of 1200 people, and when missionaries had gone before, the children would throw stones at them. All the more amazing then that last week we had a group of 40-50 sitting for some half an hour listening in almost silence as the gospel was being preached.