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The center of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, a Balkan country born just 33 years ago as an independent state, is awash in history.<\/p>\n
A statue of Alexander the Great looms over the central square. One of his father, Philip II of Macedon, towers above a nearby piazza atop an oversize pedestal. The city is also littered with tributes in bronze, stone and plaster to generations of other heroes from what the country sees as its glorious and very long history.<\/p>\n
The problem, though, is that most of the history on display is claimed by other countries. Present-day North Macedonia, birthed by the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, has no real connection to Alexander the Great, who lived 2,000 years ago down the road in what is now Greece, and many of the other historical figures honored with statues are Bulgarian.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Slavica Babamova, the director of the national archaeological museum, has spent her career digging up and displaying ancient artifacts and has no problem focusing on the past. But she said she was unsettled by the plethora of statues, erected by her country in an effort to build a state and national identity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWe have such a rich history of our own \u2014 and so many things to say. But I don\u2019t see any need to push all this overdone marketing,\u201d she said, gesturing toward the Alexander the Great statue during an interview.<\/p>\n
More important for North Macedonia and indisputably part of its history, she added, are the golden funeral mask and other stunning artifacts<\/a> that predate Alexander and were found in an ancient necropolis near the village of Trebenishte in North Macedonia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n North Macedonia\u2019s identity-building has long infuriated Greece, which claims ancient Macedonia as part of its own heritage<\/a> and has a region named after it. Also angry is Bulgaria, another neighbor very possessive about some of the historical figures, particularly a 10th-century Bulgarian ruler, whose statues now crowd the center of Skopje.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Quarrels over who owns the past have not only unsettled scholars, but have also had serious consequences, blocking North Macedonia\u2019s entry into the European Union. They have also clouded an ambitious nation-building project founded on history that others insist belongs to them \u2014 particularly Alexander the Great.<\/p>\n A conquering hero whose empire stretched from the Balkans to India in the fourth century B.C., Alexander was born in a city now in Greece. He did not live on the territory of what is today North Macedonia, historians generally agree, or speak its Slavic language. Slavs arrived in the area hundreds of years later.<\/p>\n But some of North Macedonia\u2019s territory was actually part of the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia<\/a> and is scattered with archaeological sites containing artifacts from that time.<\/p>\n The problem, said Ms. Babamova, the museum director, is not that North Macedonia has no connection to the time of Alexander the Great but that it has overstated its claims. That, she added, started after the disintegration of Yugoslavia as nationalists began looking for ways to strengthen their fragile new state.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the 1990s, there was a kind of hysteria,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Greece, furious when its neighbor declared independence in 1991 using the name Macedonia, vowed to block its entry into NATO and the European Union.<\/p>\n