The Plaques on the Horseman
Skopje was rebuilt after the 1963 earthquake as an international project — a United Nations competition, a Japanese master plan and a concrete city paid for by seventy-eight countries. Half a century later the government wrapped much of it in plaster columns and bronze statues, and a treaty signed on a Greek lakeshore in 2018 obliged the city to bolt explanatory plaques onto them.
The old railway station in Skopje is half a building. One wing stands; the rest was sheared away and never replaced. The clock on the surviving facade reads 5.17, which was the time on the morning of 26 July 1963 when an earthquake of about magnitude 6.1 went through the city on a fault running underneath it. Around 1,070 people were killed. Roughly four fifths of the building stock was destroyed or left unusable, and most of the population had nowhere to sleep that night.
What happened next is the thing Skopje is actually unusual for. Yugoslavia was non-aligned, so aid arrived from both Cold War blocs at once — seventy-eight countries in the end, with prefabricated housing districts still known locally by the names of the states that sent them. The United Nations coordinated the reconstruction and the city was given the title of City of International Solidarity. Skopje was not merely rebuilt. It was rebuilt by a committee of the whole world, in concrete, and that decision is still visible from any street corner in the centre.
The plan that was a fifth built
In 1965 the UN ran an international competition for the master plan. Eight teams entered, four Yugoslav and four foreign, and the jury split the first prize — sixty per cent to Kenzō Tange's office in Tokyo, forty per cent to the Zagreb team of Radovan Miščević and Fedor Wenzler. Tange proposed two devices: a City Wall, a continuous ring of high-density housing enclosing the centre, and a City Gate, a transport and commercial complex where everything arriving in Skopje would be funnelled through one structure. Very little of it was built. The elevated railway station Tange designed opened in 1981 and is the largest surviving fragment. What did get built around it was a generation of buildings by architects who had absorbed the same argument: Janko Konstantinov's post office, a lobed concrete drum that has stood fire-damaged since 2013; the opera and ballet house by a Slovenian team; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the hill, which opened in 1970 after a Polish initiative gathered donated works and donated design from across the world. For thirty years this was simply what Skopje looked like.
A state that could not use its own name
The country voted for independence on 8 September 1991 and was the only Yugoslav republic to leave without a war; the federal army withdrew peacefully by March 1992. Then the name became the problem. Greece objected that Macedonia is the name of its own northern province and of an ancient Hellenic inheritance, and that a neighbouring state using it without qualification implied a claim on both. Skopje's position was that a people is entitled to call itself what it calls itself, and that this is not a matter for negotiation with anybody. The UN admitted the country on 8 April 1993 under the provisional reference "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" — a formula designed to postpone the question rather than answer it. Greece imposed a trade embargo in February 1994; it was lifted after an Interim Accord signed in New York on 13 September 1995, under which the flag carrying the Vergina Sun was replaced and Greece accepted as settled the constitutional amendments Skopje had already passed in January 1992 disclaiming any territorial claim; in return Greece undertook not to block accession to international bodies under the provisional name. Meanwhile the UN stationed its first purely preventive deployment on the northern border, a mission that ended in February 1999 when China vetoed its renewal. In 2001 an Albanian insurgency and the security forces fought a seven-month conflict that closed with the Ohrid Framework Agreement of 13 August, which expanded the official use of Albanian and pushed power down to the municipalities. By 2010 the state was nineteen years old, still had no agreed name, and had a capital whose most conspicuous buildings had been designed by foreigners for a country that no longer existed.
The dispute was never really about a border. It was about who is entitled to a word, and there is no arbitration procedure for that.
Skopje 2014
The government announced the answer in February 2010, in a computer-animated promotional video. Skopje 2014 filled the centre with new museums, ministries and courts in a neoclassical and neo-baroque idiom that the city had never had, lined the Vardar bridges with bronze statues of national figures, and put a very large mounted warrior in the middle of Macedonia Square. The statue is officially titled Warrior on a Horse. Everybody understands it to be Alexander, and the official title exists precisely because saying so out loud was a diplomatic act.
The programme did not only add. It also re-clad. Modernist blocks along the river, the government building among them, were given plaster facades with columns and pediments fixed to their fronts, so that the concrete city built by international donation after 1963 disappeared behind an invented eighteenth century. Supporters argued that a young state with a contested name needed visible symbols and that the centre had been bleak. Critics — including a large part of the country's architectural profession — called it antiquisation: a claim to ancient Macedonian descent staked in bronze, aimed at Athens, and paid for by a country with high unemployment. Politicians speaking for the ethnic Albanian population, roughly a quarter of the country, pointed out that the national story being cast in metal did not include them, and answered with a Skanderbeg square of their own across the river in Čair.
The bill and the paint
The opening figure quoted by the government was in the region of €80 million. In 2015 the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network published a database of what had actually been commissioned — 136 objects, and spending above €600 million, assembled from public procurement records rather than estimates. That number arrived in the middle of a wiretapping scandal that had already put the government under sustained pressure. When the president issued pardons to politicians under investigation in April 2016, the protests that followed took the monuments as their target and threw paint at them, giving the movement its name: the Colourful Revolution. Photographs of a bronze lion covered in pink and yellow went round the world. After the change of government in May 2017 the remaining works were largely stopped and a commission was set up to review what had been built. Nothing significant was demolished, which is the usual fate of such reviews.
Article 8
The name was settled on 17 June 2018 at Psarades, a village on the Greek shore of Lake Prespa, about forty kilometres from where this route crosses the Galičica pass. The Prespa Agreement gave the state a geographic qualifier — the Republic of North Macedonia — while keeping Macedonian as the name of the nationality and the language, with an explicit statement that these relate to a different historical context from the ancient Hellenic civilisation of Greek Macedonia. A referendum on 30 September 2018 returned about 94 per cent in favour on a turnout near 37 per cent, below the 50 per cent threshold that would have made it binding; parliament went ahead anyway and amended the constitution on 11 January 2019 with 81 votes out of 120. The name changed on 12 February 2019 and NATO membership followed on 27 March 2020. Article 8 of the agreement is the part visitors can see. It required a review of monuments and public signage referring to ancient Hellenic history: the airport and the main motorway lost Alexander's name in 2018, and plaques went up beside the statues in the centre of Skopje noting that the figures belong to ancient Hellenic history and civilisation. The dispute did not end there — Bulgaria blocked the opening of EU accession talks from November 2020 over the status of the Macedonian language and shared nineteenth-century history, and the compromise reached in July 2022 requires a constitutional amendment naming Bulgarians in the preamble, which needs a two-thirds majority and has not passed at the time of writing. Stand in Macedonia Square and you can read most of that off the furniture. Then walk four hundred metres to Konstantinov's post office, which nobody has ever had to explain.