MIKO is Back

Why Miko?

Miko is a favorite nickname gained in the old village in old Yugoslavia. When I took it from Slovenia to Bosnia then Serbia Kosovo Hungary and elsewhere, it was the most natural name.

As a sign of respect, some called me Čika Mika. That is, Mr. Miko.

Lost nicknames are like lost countries.

It is easier to pinpoint precisely where they were founded than where they were lost.

Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Miko.

A quarter century ago at the scorched end of a burned millennium, I named the first of my three companies, MIKO Photo.

I educated Americans about life in Africa through a hundred projects that relied heavily of photography, daily life, people and ceremonies.

The MIKO photo archive of 100,000 images and projects folded into BREAKTHROUGH Leadership. At least we know where that silver emulsion country was lost and stored.

Somewhere in the past fifteen years the name everybody knew me by, faded like an old road map.

Like many of us in 2020, I am at another phase of change - location, work, life.

I pulled out the Michelin road map and am unfolding it.

I used to live by these maps.

Our part of Slovenia, the Bela Krajina White Frontier, cuts into Croatia like a pair of scissors. On the Michelin Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Preloka, the village of fifty houses, pops up in the northwest of the map, just fifty miles from the paper corner of Bosnia.

Gornja Preloka (the upper village) is the last village in Slovenia, where my grandmother was born at the top of a hill near the church.

Rolling downhill Donja Preloka (the lower village) is as wet as the first village in Croatia. Here my grandmother washed laundry in the Kupa River. Nicknamed 'Gradjanje' town folk, they kept their family strains separate from those with the same surname.

Vukobrati 'Wolves Brothers' lived in the low wood near the River, so nicknamed for living in the wild, away from the civilising influences of the church bells on the hilltop. Here my grandfather's farm was the last thing next to the river that forms the border with Croatia. His fields lay across, where our surname is still more common.

Before 1910, they met as kids renovating the church.

He blasted stone. She led the donkeys pulling wagons of stone to the church.

Waves of migration tossed their rocks to the same industrial shore.

About 1920, they met again on another hill, above a steel mill.

I learned in my graduate studies that multiple identities contribute to the effectiveness of the agent of change.

"Who am I?" is a big part of change.

MIKO is back.