Macedonia to Market 'Skopje 2014' Souvenirs

Skopje's central area | Photo by: Balkan Insight

Macedonia's Ministry of Culture has commissioned small figurines of buildings that are part of the Skopje 2014 project, along with fridge magnets, key chains and puzzles depicting the city's new array of sculptures and monuments.

“We felt a need to fill in the gap in this particular area,” the state secretary in the Ministry of Culture, Darko Stefanovski, said.

He says shoppers will soon be able to buy small models of the new national theatre, the 20-metre-high triumphal arch, called “Macedonia”, the new museum of Macedonian's national struggle and the new archeological museum, all currently under construction in the capital.

The ministry plans to open some 40 outlets across the country where it will sell the souvenirs. They will be sold alongside other freshly commissioned souvenirs, some of which are replicas of important archeological finds in the country.

Skopje 2014, the facelift aimed at dignifying Skopje’s run-down centre, was first unveiled in 2009. Critics object to its cost and lament the project's reliance on architectural styles drawn from Classical Antiquity, but it is proving popular enough with the general public.

The project envisages the erection of at least 15 new buildings, including theatres, concert halls, office buildings and museums. Besides the arch, the plan envisages an obelisk, several large fountains and two new bridges. Some 20 tall statues and over 100 smaller ones have been erected already, or await erection.

The government maintains that the bill for the entire project comes in at under 80 million euro. The opposition insists that it will cost over 500 million euro in the end.

The authorities hope the revamp will attract significantly more tourists to Skopje than came in the past, when the greyish Communist-era landscape did little to draw visitors.

City Hall claims that record numbers of tourists visited the city last year and that this year they expect even more. However, they did not offer specific numbers.

“Organized tour groups are pouring in from many parts of the world to visit the city but most stay only day or two. Our intention in future is for them to stay longer,” the Mayor’s office told Balkan Insight.

For now, some tourists seem a tad disoriented by the massive construction works in the city centre.

“The statues [on the main square] seem OK but there are so many that I can't tell which is which,” said 22-year-old Svetlana Andropova, from Russia.

“The whole city is one big construction site and to be frank it is not pleasant at this moment - but it's too early to judge as the works are not completed yet,” said an elderly Israeli woman, who had just visited the Skopje Holocaust Museum, which opened this year also as part of the revamp.