Antiquisation

The antiquisation will possess the inestimable virtue of making the play clear to the Athenians.

With its aggressive policy of cultural and historical ‘antiquisation’ of Macedonia, by renaming Skopje’s Airport ‘Alexander the Great’ and building an over 36-metre high monument of Alexander the Great in the centre of Skopje, by initiating proceedings against Greece in November 2008 in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and through various other initiatives that may be deemed unnecessary nationalistic provocations, it seems that the government actually used the dispute mainly for domestic purposes: to boost its ratings among the ‘patriotic’ voters and to use it as an excuse for every and any political failure.

To be sure, even before Bucharest, the Gruevski government moved to rename the Skopje airport ‘Alexander the Great’. But the failure at Bucharest represented a decisive move towards what in Macedonia is known as the policy of antiquisation. / Antiquisation is an ambitious state-sponsored programme dedicated to cementing the proposition that there is a direct link between ancient Macedonia and contemporary ethnic Macedonians (Vangeli 2011).