Finding
New Gods

Skopje and the invention of continuity

Skopje does not possess a single historical face. Roman and Byzantine precedents, more than five centuries of Ottoman rule, the Yugoslav period, the reconstruction after the catastrophic earthquake of 1963 and the post-independence city all remain legible in different parts of the capital. Finding New Gods is interested precisely in what happens when those layers are asked to form one coherent national story.

Skopje 2014 and “antiquisation”

The government-backed project known as Skopje 2014 was announced in 2010 and rapidly transformed the centre with new monuments, classical and baroque-style façades, museums, bridges and monumental statuary. Scholars and critics frequently describe one strand of this policy as “antiquisation”: the attempt to give modern Macedonian identity a more visible continuity with the ancient kingdom of Macedon.

The most conspicuous example is the enormous equestrian monument installed in Macedonia Square in 2011. Officially named Warrior on a Horse, it was universally understood as Alexander the Great. Its very ambiguity made it politically potent during the long dispute with Greece over the name “Macedonia” and over claims to the ancient past.

The Stone Bridge: a hinge between cities

The Stone Bridge crossing the Vardar is one of Skopje’s defining landmarks. The standing bridge is fundamentally an Ottoman monument of the fifteenth century, although archaeological evidence indicates an earlier bridge in the area during the age of Justinian. Today it links Macedonia Square with the Old Bazaar — two parts of the city whose architecture and historical associations are markedly different.

In the drawing, the bridge performs the same function conceptually. It connects Alexander and Tito without reconciling them. It is both passage and fault line.

Tito after Yugoslavia

Josip Broz Tito belongs to another historical order altogether. Socialist Yugoslavia formally disappeared in the 1990s, but Tito’s presence in Skopje has never simply vanished. His memory has been preserved, removed, contested and revived in monuments, institutions and in the history of the city’s reconstruction after the 1963 earthquake.

Here Tito is shown from behind. He is neither glorified nor caricatured. He looks across the river while the newer symbols rise around him. The posture turns him into a witness to a city whose public mythology continued to change after his death.

Crosses, stars and another future

Skopje’s monumental landscape is not limited to antiquity. The 66-metre Millennium Cross was erected on Mount Vodno in 2002 as a major Christian landmark visible above the capital. In the drawing, however, the religious cross is displaced by another sign high in the darkness: part of the European circle of stars.

That incomplete ring does not provide a solution. Europe appears as another horizon against which identity is negotiated — alongside the ancient past, Ottoman Skopje and the Yugoslav twentieth century.

After Prespa

The 2018 Prespa Agreement with Greece changed the country’s official name to the Republic of North Macedonia and also altered the interpretation of some of Skopje’s most controversial monuments. In 2019, plaques were added to monuments including the Alexander figure, clarifying their association with ancient Hellenic history and civilisation.

This later re-labelling is particularly relevant to Finding New Gods. Public monuments do not acquire one meaning at the moment they are erected. Their identities can be renamed, qualified and politically re-read — just as cities themselves are.