Pity the poor Serbs, for it seems everyone is against them. In the current football tournament, Albanian and Croat fans have been singing ‘Kill, kill, kill the Serb’ at matches where Serbia has been playing. The Serbs, not unnaturally, have complained.
None of this has anything to do with sport, and everything to do with politics. The break-up of Yugoslavia took the path towards violence when Slobodan Milosevic, on 24th April 1987, told the Serbs of Kosovo, who were being beaten by police during a rowdy political meeting, ‘No one will beat you again!’ This was interpreted as giving a blank cheque to the Kosovar Serbs in their fight against the Albanians. This date is usually seen as the beginning of the end of Yugoslavia.
On 28th June 1989, Milosevic did it again, also in Kosovo, commemorating the anniversary of the famous battle: ‘Six centuries later, now, we are being again engaged in battles and are facing battles. They are not armed battles, although such things cannot be excluded yet.’ This was a coded call to arms. The results we all know: 140,000 dead, and defeat for Serbia in Slovenia, in Croatia and Kosovo, and a partial but pyrrhic victory in Bosnia, along with Montenegrin and Macedonian independence.
Twenty-five years have passed but people have not forgotten. It is not simply that the memory is raw, but that the issues that caused the wars have not been resolved, at least not south of the border that once divided the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The constitutional arrangements in Bosnia and Hercegovina are delicately calibrated and too complicated to go into here, but it seems clear that the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, is determined to upset them, and, in the opinion of some, return to war.
If many of us see the Serbs as addicted to war, with a long history of political violence going back to the coup of 1903 when Queen Draga and King Alexander were murdered, the Serbs see themselves as victims, first of the Turks, then of the Austrians in the First World War, and then of the Germans and their Croatian allies in the Second. Moreover, they see the way the Serbs were driven out of the Krajina region of Croatia as a crime, and the way they were driven out of Kosovo as the same. It is of course true that the Serbs have suffered, but the suffering is largely because of actions their leaders initiated. They see their exclusion from the EU as a continued ostracization. The conflict is not over, because the reasons for the conflict are still simmering.
But never mind Bosnia, or even Kosovo, what about Northern Macedonia? This chunk of territory, from which I write this, was never meant to be a country until very recently. As late as 1913, in the aftermath of the the first Balkan War, freshly liberated from the Turks, most of it was claimed by Bulgaria; in the Second Balkan War, Serbia and Greece grabbed sections of it. The current Northern Macedonia is what was formerly part of Serbia but historical Macedonia is rather larger. Alexander the Great was born in Pella, which is well within the borders of modern Greece, and just one of the reasons the Greeks were annoyed by the former Yugoslav republic calling itself Macedonia when that is a region of Greece.
But never mind the Greeks, Northern Macedonia has internal problems of its own. Those who identify as Macedonian are in the majority, but a substantial minority are Albanian, at least a quarter. The former are Orthodox Christians, the latter overwhelmingly Muslim. In practice this means that there are two parts to Skopje, one Muslim and Albanian, and another Christian and Macedonian. North of the river is full of mosques and the call to prayer is loud and fills the air from all directions. People wear Muslim dress. South of the river there are lots of brand new churches, including a shrine of Mother Teresa, and on top of the nearby mountain there is a giant cross. Going south from Skopje, every village has an identikit, flat pack, Saudi or Turkish financed mosque, and you do not see churches until you approach Ohrid. Then you start to see lots of giant crosses on hillsides as well. Are these, like the mosques, signs of piety, or are they just there to mark out the territory on one group? The latter, I suspect. Moreover, quite a few Muslim villages boast huge Albanian flags; by contrast there are Macedonian flags all over public buildings in Skopje. In short, inside Macedonia are two competing national identities. How will that end?
As for Skopje itself, in 2014, the government embarked on a huge building plan to beautify the national capital. The results of this nation building through architecture project have to be seen to be believed. Statues of Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon and other less well known heroes are everywhere, along with monumental concrete and cladding neo-classical monstrosities which are already falling down. This building programme was meant to prove the opposite, but it had revealed, at least to me, the Potemkin village status of Macedonian statehood.
For those of us who love architecture, Skopje is something of a revelation. It suffered a terrible earthquake in 1963, and it gained a few Yugoslav brutalist buildings after that, if you like that sort of thing, which I do. But these are now swamped by the new Vegas-style classicism, not to mention a fair amount of filth and graffiti. Moreover the old buildings of Skopje have been heavily restored, rendering them essentially modern in appearance. The ancient castle above the town has been in many places rebuilt with disastrous effects, and some of the mosques have been covered with grotesque modern render or rebuilt completely. It is, quite simply, an architectural horror story.
Horror story or not, in Macedonia architecture is politics, and if the architecture is confusing and disturbing, the political story, which is still being written, is perhaps more so.