A statue of Alexander the Great is in the central square. One of his fathers, Philip II of Macedon, towers over a nearby piazza above a huge forest. The city is also full of tributes in bronze, stone and plaster to another generation of heroes from what the country sees as its glorious and long history.
The problem is, however, that most of the history shown is claimed by other countries. Today’s North Macedonia, born from the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, has nothing to do with Alexander the Great, who lived 2,000 years ago in what is now Greece, and many other historical figures honored with statues are. Bulgarian language.
Slavica Babamova, director of the national archaeological museum, has spent her career excavating and displaying ancient artifacts and has no problem focusing on the past. But he said he was not comfortable with the many statues, which were built by his country to build the country’s and national identity.
“We have such a rich history of our own — and so many things to say. But I don’t see the need to push all this overdone marketing,” he said, gesturing to the statue of Alexander the Great during the interview.
More important for North Macedonia and indisputably part of its history, he added, are golden burial masks and other fascinating artifacts that predate Alexander and were found in an ancient necropolis near the village of Trebenishte in North Macedonia. The building of North Macedonia’s identity has long angered Greece, which claims ancient Macedonia as its own heritage and has a region named after it. As well as angering Bulgaria, other neighbors are very possessive about some historical figures, especially the 10th century Bulgarian rulers, whose statues are now numerous in the center of Skopje. The dispute over who owns the past not only unsettles scholars, but also has serious consequences, which hinders North Macedonia’s entry into the European Union. He also created an ambitious nation-building project founded on a history affirmed by others – especially Alexander the Great.
A conquering hero whose empire stretched from the Balkans to India in the fourth century BC, Alexander was born in a city in what is now Greece. They did not live in what is now North Macedonia, historians generally agree, or speak a Slavic language. Slavs came to the area hundreds of years later.
Sculptures adorn the bridge near the archaeological museum that crosses the Vardar River in Skopje, North Macedonia
But some areas of North Macedonia were actually part of the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia and are scattered with archaeological sites containing artifacts from that time.
The problem, says Babamova, is not that North Macedonia has nothing to do with the time of Alexander the Great, but that it has outgrown that claim. That, he added, began after the disintegration of Yugoslavia when nationalists began to look for ways to strengthen the fragile new state.
“In the late 1990s, there was a kind of hysteria,” he said.
Greece, angered when its neighbor declared independence in 1991 using the Macedonian name, vowed to block entry into NATO and the European Union.
As part of the agreement with Greece in 2018, it agreed to call itself North Macedonia, the name of the Greek government accepted quite far from the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia and Alexander the Great.
While tempers have cooled with Greece, Bulgaria has raised its own historical grievances, with nationalists there insisting that Macedonia is an artificial state recognized by communist anti-Nazi partisans, who declared it a state in 1944, and speaks the Bulgarian dialect. Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II, is putting up roadblocks to becoming a member of the European Union.
“We have the same problem with Bulgaria as with Ukraine with Russia. They say: ‘You don’t exist,'” said Nikola Minov, professor of history at Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje.
Ukraine has struggled to assert a separate identity only with the Russian Empire. But the land that is now called North Macedonia had to deal with the Roman Empire, which was part of it for five centuries, the Ottoman Empire, which ruled that part until the beginning of the 20th century, and intermittent rule by other external forces, including the Serbs and the Bulgarians.
Looking for a historical anchor to secure a new country whose only previous experience as an independent state was only 10 days in 1903, the central government ten years ago spent hundreds of millions of euros on a reconstruction project for Skopje.
It filled the city center with statues and turned drab government and commercial buildings into colonnaded palaces resembling kitschy Hollywood sets for movies about ancient times.
The country’s formidable ethnic Albanian minority also made history by asserting its own identity, erecting a large statue in honor of Skanderbeg, the Albanian military commander who, in the 15th century, led a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire.
“I miss the old Skopje,” Babamova said, waxing nostalgic for how the city looked before the invasion of Greek-style statues and columns. “He has lost his life.”
Columns are mostly hollow and some ancient ersatz facades have begun to crumble. The prime minister who ordered the change, Nikola Gruevski, fled to Hungary in 2018 to escape corruption charges.
But his nationalist party returned to power after winning the presidential and parliamentary elections on May 8.
The current leadership seems to have cooled its enthusiasm for Alexander the Great, but there is no reason to remove other statues. “This is not a false history that was just made up,” the party’s deputy leader, Timco Mucunski, insisted. “There are historians who say we have a real connection” with ancient Macedonia.
Determined to hang on to the connection, the new government has angered Greece by signaling it wants to drop “north” from the country’s name. At the swearing-in ceremony in May, the newly elected president mentioned only Macedonia, which led to the expulsion of the Greek ambassador.
Mucunski, the deputy leader of the new ruling party, said the 2018 agreement with Greece to give up Macedonia as the country’s name would be respected as a “political and legal reality” but added: “Are we happy? No!”
Dalibor Jovanovski, a prominent Skopje historian, said he also disliked the name “North Macedonia” but saw it as an unfortunate price to pay for joining the European Union.
“Everyone always thinks that history is only their own, there is no shared history,” he said. “But in this part of the world, everything is fluid. Everything is mixed.”
Some Skopje residents say they don’t like the many statues, but many are proud of what they see as a tribute to a long and proud history. “The Greeks claimed him,” said Ljupcho Efremov, walking past Alexander the Great. “But he was Alexander of Macedonia, not Alexander of Greece.”
Bisera Kostadinov-Stojchevska, a former culture minister, said she had planned to clean up the city by moving at least some of the statues to parks outside the city. But he gave up after his staff, instructed to look for violations of zoning laws, found that “unfortunately, everything is legal.”
He said he was eager to get rid of a large rendering of Czar Samuil, the 10th-century king of Bulgaria. The statue, which faces Alexander, is not only ugly and obstructs the view, he said, but also “really annoys Bulgarians.”
He wasn’t a fan of Alexander the Great either. “I don’t feel connected to them. Not linguistically, not culturally, not emotionally.”