Toše Proeski

Toše Proeski was a Macedonian pop singer and songwriter, born Todor Proeski in Prilep on 25 January 1981 and raised in Kruševo. He went to secondary music school in Bitola, where his teachers moved him from the clarinet department to singing, and later studied at the Faculty of Musical Arts in Skopje. Across the former Yugoslavia he became known as the "Balkan Elvis".

He started young: at twelve he sang at the children's festival Zlatno slavejče in Skopje, and at fifteen he won Melfest in Prilep with the Beatles' "Yesterday". In 1997 he sang "Pušti me" at Makfest, and songs by Grigor Koprov and Ognen Nedelkovski followed, among them "Usni na usni", which took second prize from the jury at the Ohrid festival in 1998. His debut album, Nekade vo nokjta, came out in 1999.

At Skopje Fest 2000 his song "Solzi pravat zlaten prsten" won the televote but finished third, behind Karolina Gočeva and the winners XXL. The album Sinot Božji followed, with the duet "Nemir" with Gočeva and "Tajno moja", the song that made him known abroad after Slavianski Bazaar in Belarus. Ako me pogledneš vo oči (2002), recorded in Macedonian and Serbian, included "Magija" with Esma Redžepova.

In 2003 he won the first Beovizija in Belgrade with "Čija si", written by Leontina Vukomanović and Željko Joksimović, and the song became a hit across the region. A year later Macedonian Radio Television sent him to Eurovision in Istanbul with "Angel si ti", sung in English as "Life"; he finished 14th with 47 points. As a UNICEF goodwill ambassador he recorded "Za ovoj svet", which became UNICEF's anthem.

Po tebe (2005), with Macedonian lyrics by Vlado Janevski, topped the charts in five countries of the former Yugoslavia, and Božilak (2006) set Macedonian traditional songs such as "Zajdi, zajdi" and "Jovano, Jovanke" with a symphony orchestra. He also recorded "Srce nije kamen" for the Croatian series Zabranjena ljubav. His last album, Igri bez granici, came out in August 2007, and on 5 October that year more than 25,000 people came to his charity concert at the City Stadium in Skopje.

Toše Proeski died on 16 October 2007, aged 26, in a car crash on the highway near Nova Gradiška in Croatia. Macedonia declared a day of national mourning and gave him a state funeral in Kruševo. The posthumous album The Hardest Thing appeared in 2009, a memorial house opened in Kruševo in 2011, and in 2019 the national arena in Skopje was renamed in his honour.