North Macedonia is a country in the Balkan Peninsula. It was born as an independent country only 33 years ago. The center of its capital, Skopje, has a long history.
A statue of Alexander the Great stands in the central square. One of his fathers, Philip II of Macedon, stands on an oversized pedestal in a nearby square. The city is also dotted with bronze, stone and plaster monuments honoring generations of heroes from the country’s glorious and long history.
But the problem is that much of the history on display is claimed by other countries. What is now North Macedonia, which was created after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 2000s, has no real connection to Alexander the Great who lived 2,000 years ago in what is now Greece, nor to many other historical figures who have statues.
Slavica Babamova, director of the National Archaeological Museum, has spent her career unearthing and displaying ancient artifacts, and she has no problem focusing on the past. But she said she was disturbed by the plethora of statues erected in her country to build national and national identity.
“We have such a rich history and we have so much to say. But I don’t think there’s a need to push for all this excessive marketing,” she said in an interview, pointing to the statue of Alexander the Great.
She added that even more important for North Macedonia, and undoubtedly part of its history, was the discovery of a golden funerary mask and other items predating Alexander’s in an ancient cemetery near the village of Trebenisht in North Macedonia. Amazing artifacts.
The construction of North Macedonia’s identity has long angered Greece, which claims ancient Macedonia as part of its heritage and has a region named after it. Equally angry is Bulgaria, another neighboring country that has become very possessive of some historical figures, especially a 10th-century Bulgarian ruler whose statues now dot the center of Skopje.
The debate over who owns the past not only unsettles academics but also has serious consequences, blocking North Macedonia’s accession to the European Union. They also cast a shadow over an ambitious nation-building project built on a history that others insist belongs to them – especially Alexander the Great.
Alexander, a conquering hero whose empire stretched from the Balkans to India in the fourth century BC, was born in a city in what is now Greece. Historians generally agree that he did not live in the territory of today’s North Macedonia and did not speak Slavic. Hundreds of years later, Slavs arrived in the area.
But some territories in North Macedonia were actually part of the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia and are dotted with archaeological sites containing artifacts from the time.
Museum director Ms. Babamova said the problem was not that North Macedonia had no connection with the time of Alexander the Great, but that it had exaggerated its claims. She added that the situation began after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when nationalists began looking for ways to strengthen their fragile new state.
“In the late 1990s, there was a kind of hysteria,” she said.
In 1991, Greece was angered by its neighbor’s declaration of independence in the name of Macedonia and vowed to block membership of NATO and the European Union.
As part of a 2018 deal with Greece, it agreed to call itself North Macedonia, a name the Greek government considers distant from the ancient kingdom of Macedonia and Alexander the Great.
Even as relations with Greece cool down, Bulgaria has raised its own historical complaints, with nationalists there insisting that Macedonia is an artificial state created by communist anti-Nazi guerrillas who declared it a state in 1944 , and speaks a Bulgarian dialect. Bulgaria was an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II and created obstacles to joining the European Union.
“We have the same problem with Bulgaria that Ukraine has with Russia. They say: ‘You don’t exist,'” said Nikolai Minov, professor of history at St. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje .
Ukraine has struggled to assert its independent identity against the Russian Empire. But the land now known as North Macedonia had to deal with the Roman Empire, of which it was once part, and the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the areas for five centuries until the early 20th century, as well as intermissions with other outside powers. Sexual domination, including Serbs and Serbs.
In search of a historical anchor to protect the new nation, whose only experience as an independent nation in 1903 lasted only 10 days, the central government poured hundreds of millions of euros into a massive reconstruction project in Skopje a decade ago.
It filled the city center with statues and transformed drab government and commercial buildings into colonnaded palaces, like a kitschy Hollywood set from a movie about antiquity.
The country’s fractious Albanian minority has also gone down in history for asserting its independent identity, erecting a huge statue to Skanderbeg, the 15th-century Albanian military commander who led the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire.
“I miss old Skopje,” said Ms. Babamova, the museum’s director, growing nostalgic for what the city looked like before the invasion of statues and Greek-style columns. “It has lost its soul.”
The columns are mostly hollow, and some of the imitations of ancient facades have begun to crumble. Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who ordered the rehabilitation, fled to Hungary in 2018 to escape a corruption conviction.
But his nationalist party returned to power after winning presidential and congressional elections on May 8.
The current leadership appears to have cooled enthusiasm for Alexander the Great but sees no reason to remove him or other statues. “This is not a false history that we just created,” insisted the party’s deputy leader Timco Mucunski. “Some historians say we have real ties to ancient Macedonia.”
The new government is determined to maintain those ties and has expressed a desire to remove “North” from the country’s name, angering Greece. During the swearing-in ceremony in May, the newly elected president called Macedonia, leading to the withdrawal of the Greek ambassador.
Mukunski, deputy leader of the new ruling party, said the 2018 agreement with Greece to give up the name Macedonia would be considered a “political and legal reality”, but added: “Do we like it? No!
Dalibor Jovanovski, a well-known historian in Skopje, said that he also does not like the name “North Macedonia”, but believes that it is an unfortunate price that must be paid to join the European Union.
“Everyone always thinks that history belongs only to them and there is no common history,” he said. “But in this part of the world, everything is fluid. Everything is chaotic.
Some Skopje residents say they don’t like so many cluttered statues, but many are proud of them because they see them as a tribute to a rich past. “The Greeks claimed him,” Ljupcho Efremov said as he walked past Alexander the Great. “But he was Alexander of Macedon, not Alexander of Greece.”
Former Culture Minister Bisera Kostadinov-Stojchevska said she planned to clear the city of statues by moving at least some of them to a park outside the city. But she gave up when her staff, ordered to look for zoning code violations, found “unfortunately, everything was legal.”
She said she was particularly eager to move away from the dramatic depiction of Czar Samuil, the 10th-century Bulgarian king. She said the statue facing Alexander was not only ugly and obstructed the view, but “really irritated Bulgarians”.
Nor was she a big fan of Alexander the Great. “I felt like I had no connection with him at all. Not linguistically, not culturally, not emotionally.
