‘Skopje 2014’ – National identities, historiography, and cross border relations

The development project known as ‘Skopje 2014’, is a multi-million Euro transformation of Macedonia Square and its area either side of the river Vardar. Unveiled in February 2010, it leans heavily on a ‘classical antiquity’ style and comprises of buildings, statues, an arch and obelisk, as well as a new footbridge. Given the turbulent political context of relations with Greece, along with a volatile ethnic situation domestically with the Albanians, my objective is to analyse the varying factors that surround the present VMRO-DPMNE government’s attempts to strengthen Macedonian national identity through Skopje’s urban landscape.

Laura Kolbe (‘Central and Eastern European capital cities’, in Planning Perspectives, 2007) conducted fascinating research into the presentation of Eastern European cities to the West via websites, and how capital cities in post-Socialism are seeking to portray themselves in a ‘European’ manner. I seek to invert this thesis and argue that ‘Skopje 2014’ is a project led by the current VMRO-DPMNE government’s nationalist discourse to ‘nationalise’ the city of Skopje for its ethnic Macedonian, domestic audience. Two problems arise from this and are intertwined. Firstly, the symbolism of the project affects relations with Greece; therefore I will seek to address the conflicting claims to Macedonian history and its impact on Macedonian national identity in view of the contemporary relations between these two states. Secondly, the location of the buildings and the perspective the individual takes alters depending on ethnicity and location within the city. As such, I will address recent ethnic Macedonian and Albanian tensions, which centre on the question of nationality, and link these to how ‘Skopje 2014’ could further entrench negative perceptions of the ‘Other’.

To deal with the first problem, I will use Benedict Anderson’s thesis (Imagined Communities, 2007) where he proposed the ‘following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.’ In this sense, an analysis of Macedonian national identity needs to be understood in the context of the nation being a creation, albeit in constant construction, whose limits and sovereignties overlap on to other nations. And because, as Victor Roudometof (Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict, 2007) says, at ‘the heart of the dispute lies the thesis that the Republic is the official homeland of the Macedonian nation.’, one needs to trace the emergence of Macedonia as a republic from the mid to late 19^th century when national identities in the region began forming and interacting.

The geographical region known as Macedonia was mostly ruled over in its entirety, for over 400 years by the Ottoman Empire, up until the end of the Balkan Wars of 1912/13, albeit with a short spell in an autonomous Bulgaria in the 1870s. During this time, the communities that lived there identified more with their religious confession or language. However after the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 interest in the region grew, due to its strategic geographic position, from those national groups with coterminous state boundaries surrounding it, along with the Great Powers who dictated the terms of the Treaty. So, according to Jelavich and Jelavich (The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920, 1977), Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia for ‘the last two decades of the nineteenth century […] entered into a regular battle for predominance. Their weapons were the competing churches, educational establishments and national societies.’ The resulting problem was a plethora of fluid national identities that included Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, Ottoman and a nucleus of Macedonian in an area of conflicting claims over territory. After the two Balkan Wars in 1912/13, Macedonia as a region became split amongst 3 states. It was not until 1945 that the current territorial boundaries of the present day Republic of Macedonia came into being as a republic within Yugoslavia.

Victor Roudometof’s explanation of this period reads of ‘national narratives’ emerging prior to the Balkan Wars; yet for him the failure of inter-war Greek and Serb cultural homogenisation projects was the turning point for ‘Macedonian’ to be viewed as a ‘national’ identity instead of a regional one. In his view, the post-1945 period was the starting point for the articulation of a Macedonian ‘national narrative’, with the support of the institutions of the second Yugoslavia, geared towards nation building. So after 1945, people grew up and lived in a Macedonian national culture with a Macedonian national identity. In other words, a Macedonian nation only began to emerge after a territorial state was created to support the development of an exclusive ‘national narrative’. Ulf Braunnbauer points to historians and historiography as aiding the construction of this ‘national narrative’ because ‘Macedonian historiography had a nationalist perspective from the very beginning.’ This is because historiography was needed after 1945 to consolidate Macedonian national identity to counter perceived Bulgarian territorial expansion.

This constructivist observation of the development of Macedonian national identity leads to the current dispute between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia over the claim that the Republic is the home of the Macedonian nation. Evidently, ownership of Macedonian history is essential for one side to claim the nation (and thus identity) as their own, and this has been argued on both sides through claims to historical continuity. Loring Danforth (The Macedonian Conflict, 1995) believes ‘The view of history on which the argument for the Greekness of Macedonia is ultimately based is quintessential nationalist history that reifies both the Greek nation and Greek culture and seeks to demonstrate the unbroken continuity of the “Greek” race and “Hellenism” from the dawn of history to the present.’ Therefore Greece rejects the dual notion of a Macedonian nation within a Republic of Macedonia because they claim ownership of Macedonian history through continuity. Some Macedonians do try and counter this with their own version of continuity to antiquity, but most focus on the classic cultural reawakening of ‘Macedonian’ in the 19^th century that underpins modern Macedonian nationalist thought. Ulf Braunnbauer ((Re)Writing History, 2004) sees this as a continuation of the ‘national history’ paradigm, in to the post-Socialist era. This is due to the lack of funds which deprive researchers access to external ideas, a government that still monopolises research; and researchers who feel obliged to focus on a specific era (19^th and 20^th centuries) for fear of becoming unemployed for speaking out against their elders. Therefore Macedonians are still only able to focus on researching their ‘own’ national history so that they can continue to legitimize their national identity by adding to the Macedonian ‘national narrative’. So what we have are two states who have different claims to some elements of the same history, whilst simultaneously trying to deny the other’s claim.

So how does the ‘Skopje 2014’ contribute to this reification of nationalist history? If the Macedonian ‘national narrative’ is an ongoing phenomenon even in post-Socialism, then ‘Skopje 2014’ attempts to further consolidate national identity symbolically in the city. ‘Conceptualised as an attempt to reshape the capital’s outlook by adorning the city centre with numerous monuments […] the project has been criticized as yet another dimension of the overall endeavour to redefine the public space, to bring about historical revisionism and to effect the invention of traditions.’ This is how Ljubica Spaskovska (In Search of a Demos, 2010) observes the project. Even before this project was announced other symbolic gestures were made in and around Skopje to complement the renewed attempt to solidify Macedonian national identity through a nationalist discourse of history: the renaming of the city airport to Alexander the Great, the naming of the city stadium after Philip II, the construction of a Christian Cross to commemorate 2000 years of Christianity, the use of the Vergina Sun symbol on the Republic’s flag, and so on. One could even question the intent of building the Mother Teresa memorial house as an attempt to claim her for Macedonia, even though she was born into the Ottoman Empire. Therefore the additions to the urban landscape continue in this reification process: The Alexander the Great statue in Macedonia Square, statues of leaders of the Ilinden Uprising of 1903 and religious figures, buildings in ‘classical antiquity’ style including a museum and so on.

But one can’t place this in the urban landscape alone in space and time. Cities are constructs too, and are representative of the varying political, economic and cultural discourses that the city has gone through. Just as one can’t create a homogenous community motionless in time, a city is a collage of all that came before leading to the present. Nuala Johnson, in her study on ‘monuments, geography, and nationalism’ (‘Set in Stone’, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1995), states that ‘geographers are just beginning to examine the relationships between memorialisation of the past and the spatialisation of public memory.’ These processes are being carried out with ‘Skopje 2014’. But problem the nationalist discourse has is that other histories are present that it has to compete with, such as the Socialist one and Ottoman one, in buildings that remain in the city. These include the Stone Bridge, Old Bazaar, Kale Fortress, Socialist apartment blocks, shopping centre – along side modern capitalist constructs such as the Rammstore. However the Macedonian Government still attempts to coerce its ethnic Macedonian citizens into collectively remembering their national history, by presenting the ongoing ‘national narrative’ of an imagined history through ‘Skopje 2014’. Furthermore this attempt is a deliberate provocation of Greece by trying to devalue their national identity through claiming ownership of a shared history.

In tandem with this reification and display of Macedonian national identity comes the distancing of Albanians from ethnic Macedonians within the confines of an independent Macedonian nation-state. I seek to narrow this to the two sides of the river Vardar where ‘Skopje 2014’ is placed, by looking at the demographics of the two municipalities that comprise it, Tsentar and Chair. The 2002 population census shows that in the Tsentar municipality of 45,412, 38,778 or 85% were Macedonian, and 1465 or 3% were Albanian. The 64,773 residents of Chair municipality comprised of 15,628 or 24% Macedonian and 36,921 or 57% Albanian. The rest of the population was made up of other minorities. Nationally the figure was 64% Macedonian and 25% Albanian. The conflict between these two groups was not based on a struggle over shared histories; instead theirs was a conflict over citizenship in the newly independent Macedonian state. Ljubica Spaskovska’s paper on citizenship and belonging presents a detailed narrative of how citizenship policy in Macedonia developed and contributed to the isolation of Albanians vis-à-vis their relations with Macedonians. The initial downgrading of their nationality in light of their position in the former Yugoslavia and inception of an ethno-national citizenship led to articulations of discontent and the desire for a new framework; in parallel to other factors accounting for Albanian discontent with the new state and its institutions. The Ohrid Framework Agreement in 2001 and the continued practice of consociational politics, just emphasise the differences between the two communities. So the relationship between nationality and citizenship can be expressed as the nationalisation of citizenship by the Macedonians, to the disadvantage of the Albanians. This feeds into insecurities that Albanians have regarding the rise of Macedonian cultural hegemony, and a lack of belonging to such a nationalized state.

Viewed in the post-socialist context of Skopje, one could see this as the pushing of minorities to the periphery or hiding them altogether. This is a mirror image of what Setha Low (‘The Anthropology of Cities’, in Annual Review of Anthropology, 1996) describes as a ‘Divided City’, the notion being that there are hidden barriers of race and class. The location of the buildings on the riverside is one example of how this idea can be linked to the spatial planning of ‘Skopje 2014’ in ethnic terms. If viewed from Macedonia Square, or read as a ‘Macedonian perspective’, then it blocks out the view of the Old Bazaar, and the Kale Fortress. Conversely, if one stands on the Albanian side of the Stone Bridge, the Albanian perspective is that of Alexander the Great on horseback striding towards the Albanians with the cross of Christ up upon the hillside behind. The former can be read as a wish to block out certain elements of non-nationalist history. This can also evident in the recent disputes over the renaming of city streets. The latter can be taken as an attempt to remind the Albanians of Macedonian cultural hegemony conjuring up an image of an historical leader ‘leading’ Macedonians across the river, as an attempt to rewrite history and to collectively ‘forget’ the presence of Albanians.

In conclusion, ‘Skopje 2014’ can be viewed as a continuation of 6 decades of Macedonian nation-building, in the form of urban planning and spatial development. On the one hand, it is an attempt by Macedonians to claim single ownership over Macedonian history against Greek attempts to do the same. This is present in the numerous symbolic processes undertaken and ongoing in the city of Skopje, in an almost ‘Andersonian’ attempt to (re)create an imagined Macedonian community. On the other, this attempt at developing a national narrative through ‘Skopje 2014’ is excluding the sizeable Albanian minority, already fearful of their place in the nation-state due to citizenship issue, compounded by their lack of presence in the present constructions of Skopje. This may be a matter of perspectives on the construction through the location of the individual in the city. So going back to Laura Kolbe, the Macedonian government is not looking externally to present the city to the world, but is looking internally to its domestic, Macedonian audience.

Addendum

Since writing this in early 2012, more constructs have occurred, and some political changes. The VMRO-DPMNE have recently won their third term in office, yet in the previous municipal elections they lost the Mayoralty for the area where the regeneration is occurring. This led to questions being raised about the hefty cost and  the possibility of halting the construction.

Further updates to the vista of constructions include galleons on the river, the ‘updating’ of commercial buildings on the square, and the transformation of the National Assembly building. All maintain the ‘national narrative’ of the ruling party. Yet, succour was paid to opponents both political and ethnic. Further statues were added recognizing socialist or communist ‘national’ heroes. Yet this just underpins the nationalist zeal with which the ruling party is imposing its version of history. It’s only of those it deems worthy of appearing in its nationalised public space.

In the Albanian area, a statue of Skanderbeg was allowed. But this reifies ethnic division on two levels. It allows Albanians to have ‘their’ own statue, but it is geographically placed outside of the arena where the other projects are occurring, thus symbolically isolating the Albanian community in the present. Yet it also isolates the Albanians historically as the choice of idol doesn’t fit in with the Macedonian ‘national narrative’, thus creating a separate (and deliberate) bridge between past and present for the Albanians. So the project has continued to pursue the path of division in the name of ‘a’ perspective of what being ‘Macedonian’ is meant to be.

My Images of SEE – 08:13, Wed 10th August

We gave up in the park after being approached by a woman asking for 20 cents. So we went to McDonalds. We wished away the last 40 minutes over a Cola and McFlurry. Very Western! We then walked down Egnatia to the hotel, collected out rucksacks then continued down Egnatia to Democracy Square – then on to the Law Courts. As we walked down this street, a bus was coming in the opposite direction. Surprisingly it was ours! So we waited next to it as the queues of people grew from 17:00 to 17:30.

However, during this wait I noticed that our tickets said the 8^th August for travel, not 9^th. So I dashed across the road, half expecting the place to be shut, but alas it wasn’t. A woman checked that I was supposed to be on today’s list and re-wrote the date on our tickets. Phew. So at 17:30 we were loading on to the bus, handing in our tickets to two female Simeonidis staff. We grabbed our seats, and no sooner than we plonked down, than a woman sat in front of me swishing her endless head of hair over the back of her seat, into my private space. I had to take a picture.

Once the bus filled, we then departed. We left Thessaloniki westward, then turned north into its rural hinterland. The area was low, arid, and quite devoid of life. It seemed a very agrarian part of Greece, if not representative of the whole of Greece. Mountains were visible in the distance, 30 minutes in; then a man present on the bus began collecting passports. So we just copied and handed them in. 

15 minutes later we were at the border. A massive queue of lorries stretched about a mile to get in. The young man and bus driver went to customs with our passports. 25 minutes later our bus moved on to a duty free shop in what I would describe as ‘no man’s land’, but was still theoretically Greece. After a toilet break we then entered the Republic of Macedonia. At the next gate, a Border Guard got on and collected passports. He took them and spent another 20 minutes checking them. We then continued our journey.

Macedonia was literally a different country. Where we were at present, in the far south, there were vineyards and masses amounts of greenery – not arid at all. There were rolling hills, and mountains in the distance. We crossed the Vardar a couple of times before reaching the valleys. These were superb, akin to the Conwy Valley. Luscious green forest spread to the waters edge on one side of the valley, but on its other bank provided for fertile land. These were being toiled as we drove past. Even in villages where the houses were closer together, people toiled their plots. It then started to get dusky.

We continued through tunnels before reaching the first of two plains, containing the town of Veles one could only presume. We whisked past this, for another 40 minutes, before reaching the plain containing Skopje. It was a large expanse incorporating a settlement near to the airport too, although that was to the east of the motorway. We arrived into the central bus station for 21:15 local time – 5 hours after departing.

We collected our belongings then walked through the bus station to the cash point. We then made the 8 minute journey to the Nice Hostel. It was in a 2 piece apartment block, on the 3^rd floor. Our host was there along with other residents. He showed us our room, which was clean but basic. He took our passports to inform the police of our arrival. He returned, gave us the Wi-Fi password, then we left to walk into town. We walked past the Assembly building to our left, and continued to the old Soviet style shopping mall. Oh how 2 ½ years has changed the city. There is now an ‘Arc de Triomphe’ just off the main square, and on it even more sights to be seen. A massive column some 70 ft high with a rider on horseback. Behind that, a religious figure sitting down. Clockwise 45 degrees from that a pillared dome for something. Then opposite the river, 3 massive new buildings under construction blocking the view of the Kale fort; and one was modeled on a Greco-Roman pillared theme. Ghastly.

We sat down at Pelister on the square and ordered and over-sized meal. Cheeses, hams and pitta. Way too much for us two. We had some beers and relaxed for 1 ½ hours. The square was bustling., and the people seemed a lot happier than when I was here before, a lot more approachable. Also, it seems miles ahead of Thessaloniki on being a modern city, just the way people dressed emitted that. We left at 23:30 for the hostel, then tried to sleep. The fan was giving us its all but it was boiling – so we had a rough sleep, if sleep we did. And I had a rough tummy and headache. Welcome to Macedonia! 

The context of the latter part of the entry above is that I visited Macedonia for my first time in February 2009. My trip, on the weekend of Valentine’s and St. Tryphon (the guardian of vineyards), came about because of my employment with the Labour Party. The Westminster Foundation for Democracy provides money for UK political parties to send staff to their sister parties in emerging democracies. I got chosen to go to Macedonia to present to the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM, or CДСМ in Cyrillic). This party was formerly the League of Communists of Macedonia in the Yugoslav federation. I developed a two day training programme and delivered it to 20 youth members of the SDSM. Being the representative of the Labour Party in a foreign country was humbling, and a task I thoroughly enjoyed doing. This was my first visit to south-east Europe. I have been to Macedonia 3 times since then and am planning to go again this year. Back then, there was just a blank, wide open square at the city’s heart. The blankness ironically seemed to symbolise its grandness. The statues make it cluttered. But more on that later on.

My Images of SEE – 15:34, Tue 9th August

Our last day in Thessaloniki today, so we packed up and left our quaint hotel room for the last time. The hotel kindly kept our bags for us until later. We set off walking in the mild heat towards the White Tower, going via backstreets to keep in the shade. We decided to stop in Starbucks for an hour to pass time and read. Even Starbucks wasn’t a no-go area for the street sellers.

At 12:00 we departed for the Museum of Byzantine History, near to the Archeological Museum and adjacent to City Hall. For €4 apiece we wondered around a well laid out exhibition and architecturally easy to walk building. We saw paintings, mosaics, coins, tombs, photo’s of digs, kitchenware etc. All very interesting. It had a definite ‘Macedonian’ edge to it as opposed to a ‘Greek’ theme.

We left just after 13:00 and walked back to the White Tower. Local police were still monitoring the area in anticipation of a repeat of recent protests. We walked along the front to a small café and ordered food. One thing I noticed more and more was the Greek passion for smoking. Everywhere we were, people lit up. A filthy habit. The waiter apologized as the oven failed to start, so my pizza was late. Liam’s Greek Salad looked lovely.

We then left. I was convinced I saw a ‘Spar’ shop, so we walked the length of the shopping street, past the Ladidika area. I must have been mistaken, as there was no shop. So we meandered back to Aristotle Square, then up to the park further up the hill for the last hour before picking up our luggage.

My current thoughts on my visit to the Byzantine Museum, and the observation of the ‘Macedonian’ presentation of history on show, continues my observations made in a previous post – that of nation building in the new state of Greece, and nationalism as a goal and process.

To put the first idea of nation building in context, the modern interest in Greece began around 200-300 years ago, and revolved around the West’s rediscovered fascination with Hellenism. This connected Ancient Greek writers, philosophy, architecture, etc, to the present and was dubbed Philhellenism. This developing sense of common Greekness allowed the disparate populations to become even more strongly identified as Greek across the Ottoman Empire and claim almost 2,000 years of common descent. The Orthodox Church acted as the strongest pillar of unity via the millet system at the time. However, only a small grouping pursued this idea. Indeed the first hope of a Greek state was actually in the Ottoman vassal Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. The Phanariots – Greeks who lived in a quarter of Constantinople and exercised great power in the Ottoman administration – ruled here and were seen as harbourers of Greek culture. An initial revolt there, soon suppressed, led to the uprising surfacing in the area now occupied in contemporary southern Greece.

Concepts of time and space shifted to allow for the perennial linking of modern Greeks to the Ancients and for the disparate groups to sense their commonality even over distances. Whilst not disputing that culturally similar tribes of Greeks existed prior to modernity, the fact is that only by a small group being able to (re)invent and communicate a national Greek narrative could people gain a sense of belonging to similarly defined peoples across space and time. But only the tools that states possess could accelerate these processes to ‘awaken’ those not already so. Education, a bureaucracy, the ability to communicate swiftly, all lent themselves to expanding the notion of a Greek national identity. But I’m getting ahead of myself as this is nationalism as a process.

Nationalism as a goal, according to Eric Hobsbawm, seeks to make the nation and the state congruent. And social constructivist authors, like Hobsbawm, all agree on the order in which this occurs. “Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way around”. So in the 1830s a Greek state was established not by a mass uprising of all Greek nationals, but by small segments of the population possessing nationalism as an ideal to achieve a national state for Greeks, as they saw them in their definition of what it meant to be Greek.

Yet by the 1830s, they had their state but it was in no way homogenous or national. The reality on the ground shows the folly in such nationalising and homogenising projects led by Greek nationalists – Greece at present still has Albanian, Turkish, Bulgarian and Macedonian minorities, however they are recorded or treated. Prior to World War Two it was in effect a multinational state. Thus nationalism as a goal, taken up by Greek nationalists, sought to create a homogenous Greek nation-state. But only by possessing a state could homogenisation take place.

Going back to the concept of time, opens up another observation. The link to Ancient Greek was only one era of history the Greek nationalists drew on. Many eras and empires existed between these two snapshots in time: Roman, Byzantine, Macedonian, and Ottoman. E. H Carr’s quote, that millions have crossed the Rubicon but it was Julius Caesar’s crossing that history documents, highlights’ the selective nature of historians (and through them nationalists) to mould their national narrative. This selectivity, by different people for different purposes, results in differing interpretations or frames which one can present a version of history by highlighting certain events or eras (or avoiding events and eras altogether). One example is Greek nationalists erasing Greece’s Ottoman past, as evidenced in Thessaloniki mentioned previously, as it did not fit their national narrative.

Conversely, at the start and end of the 20^th century, Greece laid claim to a Macedonian past centred on the ancient Kingdom of Macedon. However the Republic of Macedonia also laid claim to this. So we have a resulting conflict by two nations over one period of history in time and space (territory), both of which are seeking it solely for themselves. The recent Greek reasoning stems less from their historical claim to this heritage (which does play its part), and more from the desire to deprive the Republic of Macedonia of it as they see them utilizing it for territorial claims upon Greece. This dispute is still present today with the withholding of NATO membership and

EU accession talks.

I will discuss further the issue of disputed claims to history later on in this blog, but I wanted to give a flavour of how museums, whether archaeological, historical, national or even city focussed, all have a function in providing a narrative. More often than not it is presenting the national narrative of the state within which the museum resides.