North Macedonia claims historical figures as part of its quest to forge a national identity. This has caused resentment among the Balkan state's neighbors.
The center of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, a Balkan state that was born only 33 years ago as an independent state, is steeped in history.
The statue of Alexander the Great towers over the central square. The statue of his father, Philip II of Macedonia, towers over the nearby square on a huge pedestal. The city is also dotted with bronze, stone and plaster monuments to generations of other heroes from what the country considers its glorious and very long history.
The problem, however, is that most of the stories on display are claimed by other countries. Today's North Macedonia, which emerged after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, has no real connection to Alexander the Great, who lived 2,000 years ago nearby in present-day Greece, and many of the other historical figures honored with statues are Bulgarian.
Slavica Babamova, director of the National Archaeological Museum, has spent her career excavating and exhibiting ancient artifacts and has no problem focusing on the past. But she says she is troubled by the many statues erected by her country in an attempt to forge a state and national identity.
"We have such a rich history of our own and so much to say. But I don't see any need for all this overblown marketing," she said, gesturing to the statue of Alexander the Great during the interview.
She added that more important to northern Macedonia, and undoubtedly part of its history, are the golden funerary mask and other stunning artifacts that predate Alexander and were found in an ancient necropolis near the village of Trebenishte in northern Macedonia.
The construction of North Macedonia's identity has long irked Greece, which claims ancient Macedonia as part of its heritage and has a region named after it. Also angry is Bulgaria, another neighbor, which has a strong attachment to some of its historical figures, especially a 10th-century Bulgarian ruler whose statues now stand in the center of Skopje.
The controversy over who is heir to the past hasn’t only alarmed scholars - it’s had serious consequences. They have also marred the ambitious project of building a state based on a history that others insist belongs to them - notably Alexander the Great.
Alexander, a conquering hero whose empire stretched from the Balkans to India in the fourth century BC, was born in what is now Greece. Historians agree that he did not live in what is now northern Macedonia and did not speak its Slavic language. Slavs arrived in the area hundreds of years later.
But part of the territory of North Macedonia was actually part of the ancient Macedonian kingdom and is littered with archaeological sites containing artifacts from that time.
The problem, says Ms. Babamova, the museum's director, is not that North Macedonia has no connection to the time of Alexander the Great, but that it has exaggerated its claims. That, she added, began after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when nationalists began looking for ways to strengthen their fragile new state.
"There was some hysteria in the late 1990s," she said.
Greece, angered when its neighbor declared independence in 1991 using the name Macedonia, vowed to block its entry into NATO and the European Union.
As part of the 2018 agreement with Greece, it agreed to call itself North Macedonia, a name the Greek government accepted as far enough removed from the ancient kingdom of Macedonia and Alexander the Great.
Just as relations with Greece were calming, Bulgaria raised its own grievances, insisting that Macedonia was an artificial nation created by the communist partisans who proclaimed the state in 1944 and spoke in a Bulgarian dialect.
Seeking a historical anchor to secure the new state, the central government a decade ago invested hundreds of millions of euros in a massive project to rebuild Skopje.
It filled the city center with statues and turned drab government and commercial buildings into palaces with colonnades resembling a kitsch Hollywood set for an ancient movie.
The country's restive Albanian minority has also immersed itself in history, asserting its own separate identity by erecting a large statue in honor of Skanderbeg, an Albanian warlord who led an uprising against the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century.
"I miss the Skopje of old," says Ms. Babamova, the museum's director, nostalgically recalling what her city looked like before the invasion of Greek-style statues and columns. "It has lost its soul."
The columns are mostly hollow, and some of the ancient ersatz facades are already starting to crumble. The prime minister who ordered the redevelopment, Nikola Gruevski, fled to Hungary in 2018 to avoid a corruption conviction.
But his party, with a nationalist bent, returned to power after winning the May 8 presidential and parliamentary elections.
Its current leadership appears to have cooled its enthusiasm for Alexander the Great but sees no reason to remove his or other statues. "This is not a fake story we have just produced," insists the party's deputy chairman Timko Mukunski. "There are historians who say we have real links" with ancient Macedonia.
Determined to preserve that link, the new government has angered Greece by signaling it wants to remove the word "north" from the country's name. During the swearing-in ceremony in May, the newly elected president referred to the country only as Macedonia, prompting the departure of the Greek ambassador.
Mutsunski, deputy leader of the new ruling party, said the 2018 agreement with Greece to drop Macedonia's name would be respected as a "political and legal reality" but added: "Do we like it? No!"
Dalibor Jovanovski, a prominent historian from Skopje, said he also disliked the name "North Macedonia" but saw it as the unfortunate price to pay for joining the European Union.
"Everyone always thinks that history belongs to them alone, that there is no common history," he said. "But in this part of the world everything is mobile. Everything is mixed."
Some Skopje residents say they dislike the clutter of so many statues, but many are proud of what they view as a tribute to a proud and long history. "The Greeks are appropriating it," says Lyubcho Efremov, walking past Alexander the Great. "But he was Alexander the Great of Macedonia, not Alexander the Greek."
Bisera Kostadinov-Stoychevska, a former culture minister, said she planned to rid the city of at least some of the statues by moving them to a park outside the city. But she gave up after her staff, instructed to look for violations of the zoning law, found that "unfortunately everything is legal."
She said she was particularly anxious to get rid of a large rendering of King Samuel, a 10th-century Bulgarian king. The statue, which faces Alexander, is not only ugly and obstructs the view, she said, but also "really annoys the Bulgarians."
She's also not a big fan of Alexander the Great. "I don't feel connected to him at all. Not linguistically, not culturally, not emotionally."
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Andrew Higgins, the Times' bureau chief for Eastern and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. Commentary for the New York Times.
