Alexander the Great died more than 2,300 years ago. But his cult of personality is just starting to grip the tiny Balkan country of Macedonia. To the annoyance of next-door Greece, which has long claimed the conqueror as its own, Macedonia has anointed Alexander its national hero. The government has renamed the international airport in his honour, as well as the main highway to Greece. Soon to come: a 72-foot-tall marble colossus of Alexander astride his favorite warhorse, Bucephalus, which will dominate the skyline of the capital, Skopje.
The mania over Alexander is the latest chapter in a long-running feud between Macedonia and Greece that some officials fear has the potential to destabilise a region still trying to recover from the Balkan wars of the ’90s.
The dispute centres on a basic question: Does Macedonia, a country born out of the rubble of the former Yugoslavia, have the right to call itself what it wants? For 18 years, the conflict has defied attempts by the US, the UN and European powers to find a solution. The Greek government refuses to recognise its neighbour’s constitutional name, the Republic of Macedonia, which it sees as a thinly veiled bid to lay claim to three of its northern districts, a region known as Greek Macedonia.
“It’s laughable,” said foreign minister Antonio Milososki. “In America, you have a good phrase to describe a confusing situation. You say, ‘It’s all Greek to me’. Sometimes we say it’s all Greek to us as well.”
Under a truce brokered in 1995 by former US secretary of state Cyrus Vance, Macedonia was allowed to join the UN on the Greek condition that it refer to itself in multinational institutions as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM. It was also required to change its flag and rewrite its constitution to include a promise never to violate Greek territory or interfere in Greece’s internal affairs. Macedonians hates the FYROM label, which is a reminder of communist times. Although the government has persuaded more than 120 countries, including the US, to recognise it as the Republic of Macedonia, it is still forced to go by FYROM at the UN.
Lacking the clout to force Greece to budge, Macedonia has intensified its glorification of Alexander and other ancient heroes, a campaign that critics in Skopje deride as ‘antiquisation’. The country has renamed its national stadium for King Philip II, Alexander’s father, and organised dozens of archaeological digs. Officials also like to needle Greeks that the philosopher Aristotle, who tutored the teenage Alexander, was from the kingdom of Macedonia, not Athens.