Nikola Gruevski - Personal Life

Personal Life

Born in 1970, Gruevski was brought up in a family that was neither privileged nor poor. His father worked in furniture and design and his mother was a nurse. After his parents’ divorce, his mother brought him up. When he was four, she went to work in Libya, like thousands of other Yugoslav citizens, and took him with her. After their return Gruevski completed primary and secondary education in Skopje. After having graduated from the Faculty of Economics at St. Clement of Ohrid University of Bitola in 1994 (where he dabbled in amateur dramatics and boxing) he entered the nascent finance sector, and was the first person to trade on Skopje's stock exchange. In 1996 he also acquired some qualifications for the international capital market from a London Securities Institute. On 12 December 2006, he obtained a Master’s degree from the Faculty of Economics at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje. Gruevski founded the Brokerage Association of the Republic of Macedonia in 1998 as its president and made the first transaction at the Macedonian Stock Exchange.

Gruevski divorced his first wife and married again in May 2007 to Borkica Gruevska with whom he has two daughters: Anastasija and Sofija.

Gruevski has family roots in Macedonia, Greece. His paternal grandparents stem from Krousorati, renamed by Greek authorities to Achlada in 1926 (Greek: Αχλάδα), a village in the Florina regional unit, Greece, where his family went by the surname Grouios ("Γρούϊος"). His grandfather, Νικόλαος Γρούιος, (Nicholaos Grouios), was mobilized by the Greek Army during the Second World War and fought in the Greco-Italian War where he lost his life in 1940 and his name is mentioned on the war memorial in Achlada among the names of the locals who were killed during World War II. Some years later, during the Greek Civil War, Gruevski's grandmother and father, like thousands of other Slavs in Greek Macedonia, fled north to what was then Yugoslav Macedonia, where they altered their name with the local authorities to Gruevski.