Skopje

The road from Kosovo brought me to North Macedonia — the last country of the former Yugoslavia on my route.

It’s a very interesting country. Until recently it was simply called Macedonia, but Greece forced it to change its name to North Macedonia, and here’s why.

One day, the nationalist party of Plain Old Macedonia, with the telling name VMRO-DPMNE, decided that their country had something to do with the ancient state ruled by Alexander the Great.

The nationalists didn’t care that even their capital, Skopje, was founded 300 years after Alexander’s death. They simply went ahead and put up a monument to him right in the city center.

The public liked the monument. VMRO-DPMNE scratched its head and decided to put up another one — to Philip of Macedon, Alexander’s father.

They looked at it: not bad either! Why not another monument? There was this Tsar Samuel. True, he was the tsar of Bulgaria. But for a whole 25 years the capital of Bulgaria was the Macedonian city of Ohrid. We have every right to consider him ours.

Gradually the Macedonians got completely carried away and started putting up monuments to everyone: the Greek linguists Cyril and Methodius, the Byzantine emperor Justinian, the Albanian writer Pjetër Bogdani, and so on.

What did all these people have to do with Macedonia? Nothing at all. But VMRO-DPMNE liked the idea of monuments so much that it launched a whole program, Skopje 2014, meant to boost tourism by monumentizing the entire country.

As a result, Skopje was crammed with so many sculptures that there’s no free space left in the poor city.

When they ran out of people, the Macedonians started putting up monuments to horses and lions.

At some point, there were too many monuments, yet less than half the budget had been spent. That’s when VMRO-DPMNE went completely off the rails and stuck triumphal arches and Roman columns all over Skopje.

The gem of the collection was the new Archaeological Museum of Macedonia, built in the style of the Greek Parthenon.

The highlight of the Macedonian Parthenon is the double-glazed windows between the columns. I swear by Zeus, Pericles must have turned over in his grave.

So. Why did Greece ask Macedonia to change its name? Because the Greeks watched all this bacchanalia and couldn’t take it anymore:

“Dudes, we get it, of course. You can put up monuments to whoever you like in your own country. But there’s one question. We have a region in Greece that borders yours. And it’s also called Macedonia. You aren’t going to claim that this region is your historical homeland, by any chance?”
“Why would we? We’re about to join NATO ourselves.”
“Oh, sure you are. Some folks around here already tried joining. How about you change your name instead? To Monumentstan, for example.”
“Well-l-l, you know what that is? Irredentism. That’s what.”
“Fine, then let’s call it North Macedonia. And if you don’t rename yourselves, we won’t let you into NATO.”

In the end, Macedonia had to hold a referendum and change its name to North Macedonia. That’s what the country is called now, even though there’s no South Macedonia anywhere in the world.

I don’t mean that Macedonia has nothing of its own. The country did have its own national heroes. Lots of monuments in Skopje are dedicated to them too. True, most of them are revolutionaries and writers nobody has ever heard of.

Mother Teresa

Still, one person from Macedonia did become world-famous. It’s a woman named Anjezë Gonxhe, better known as “Mother Teresa.”

Under the guise of charity, this sweet old lady spent many years laundering money.

With the backing of the Vatican government, she opened an international network of hospices — homes for the dying. The best known were the hospices in the faraway Indian city of Calcutta. Tracking money in India was extremely difficult, and hardly anyone counted those who died in these homes.

Teresa’s foundation received money from international criminals such as the Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier, who killed around 50,000 people, and big-time fraudsters like Charles Keating, who was sentenced to 4 years in prison for financial fraud.

In return, Mother Teresa whitewashed the reputations of her sponsors, while the money vanished without a trace in her foundation’s accounts. The German magazine Stern once calculated that only 7% of the donations went to charity.

Naturally, the patients were kept in appalling conditions. According to eyewitnesses, the hospices resembled a Nazi concentration camp: endless rows of cots and patients with shaved heads. People dying of serious illnesses were given mostly aspirin and other painkillers. There weren’t enough IV drips to go around, and needles were reused several times after being rinsed in a sink with plain water.

Mother Teresa compared the suffering of the sick to the torments of Jesus Christ and called AIDS just retribution for sins. Of course, Agnes herself was treated not in her own “homes of mercy” but in a first-class clinic in California.

All this came to light rather late. Only in 1994 was the film “Hell’s Angel” released, exposing Teresa’s crimes.

Unfortunately, the accusations were never proven in court and remain merely eyewitness accounts. Mother Teresa herself has been canonized by the church. Although, generally speaking, even rumors on this scale should give one pause: maybe, just in case, it’s better not to glorify dubious individuals who pass themselves off as messengers of invisible beings?

The Macedonian party VMRO-DPMNE answered decisively: yes, let’s glorify. And churned out a dozen monuments to Mother Teresa in Skopje.

The meaning of some of them escapes me.

The Christian Part

So what is Skopje like? The city is roughly divided into two parts: Christian and Muslim. In the center of the Christian part is a square with Alexander the Great.

Around it stand luxury hotels, shopping malls, and casinos. In other words, everything for tourists.

I admit that amid all this glaring bad taste you can spot a couple of cool facades.

But otherwise it’s terribly stuffy new construction. Every little detail in its place. It’s supposed to look Empire style, but it feels like you’re looking at a Soviet prefab block.

Right behind Alexander the Great gapes an unfinished brick palace. They could at least have covered it with an ad banner.

The city feels as if a village in Tatarstan had pooled all its wages for 10 years and bought a garden sculpture at Leroy Merlin.

And Skopje keeps insisting that everything is perfectly fine and you’re just imagining things.

No, I’m not.

Just 100 meters from Alexander the Great there’s a flea market with an ancient Greek-looking sign: “Green Bazaar.”

Somewhere around here, in Ancient Macedonia, Plato wrote his treatises.

Somewhere around here, Archimedes told a soldier: “Do not disturb my circles!”

Somewhere nearby, swift-footed Achilles couldn’t catch up with the tortoise.

The philosopher Plato wrote the Republic in democratic Greece. In it, he called aristocracy the best form of government and placed democracy between oligarchy and tyranny.

His student Aristotle wrote his Politics when Greece had already been conquered by the Macedonian Empire. He called the rule of the majority for the common good the best form of government.

Aristotle called this form “polity” and said it arises from a mix of oligarchy and democracy.

I suspect Aristotle had something else in mind. Because a mix of democracy and oligarchy is Macedonia.

By the way, in Skopje I found out that I understand Macedonian. At first I tried talking to the hotel owner in English, but he told me to just speak Russian, and he would speak Macedonian.

A minute later I noticed that I understood nothing and everything at the same time. Only a third of the words were similar. But when the Macedonian repeated a sentence at my request, another third of the words became clear. In the end, we talked by repeating each sentence three times — and understood each other perfectly!

“Tell I, Andrey, how e Macedonja?”
“Well, in the center it’s not bad, but once you go a little further, everything is dirty!”
“If ye go frae Kremlin in Moscow, clean yonder?”
“Well how to say...”

The Muslim Part

All the sculptural bacchanalia is in the Christian part, while the Muslim part across the river is actually quite nice.

The complete opposite. A world of its own.

Almost 70% of the population of this quarter are Albanians, Turks, and Bosniaks.

The quarter is called the Old Bazaar, and it’s the largest bazaar in the former Ottoman Empire after Istanbul’s.

At the bazaar you can buy anything, including uranium.

The quarter has former 15th-century Turkish baths and a couple of historic mosques.

There are also dozens of awesome Turkish places that serve delicious kebabs and the best coffee in the Balkans.

The contrast between the Christian and Muslim parts of Skopje is easy to understand: Macedonia was under Turkish rule for centuries.

What isn’t clear is what the Macedonian authorities are trying to achieve. Make up for the lost centuries by filling the Christian part with new builds? Good luck with that.