Skopje

The prompt in this textbox says 'What's up here?'

Indeed. What the heck is up here? Skopje you're wEiRd.

Alexander the Gr- I mean, 'warrior on horse', towers over the centre of town on his epic plinth. He can't even bear his real title, titanic as it is, and the puzzle of his alias is reflected by every surface you can see, a strange hall of mirrors, a distortion of a city. Nothing is quite what it seems, or is labelled as.

Marble columns, aspiring to the Acropolis, reveal themselves up close to be mouldering, decaying paeans to corrupt misappropriation of funds, fake monuments to a history claimed, yet not allowed to be owned. The country's magnificent endemic marble is sold off, and cheap knock-off stone is used here instead, so that N.Macedonia's own capital's monuments are rendered hollow, vacuous.

From a distance breathtaking; up close rotting. The bases of the columns are cracking and subsiding into the sandy riverbanks they were plonked down upon. A blonde middle-aged woman passes by you on your walking tour, and her figure casts the shadow of artifice and falsehoods. She heckles, insisting that everything your guide is saying is 'lies'. Who is she? A government worker, someone on the take from the ridiculous, brazen money laundering rackets all around our heads? Hers is an empty facade of power, like the stuccos of the casino, the museum. She implores you to believe not your own eyes, and what is clearly going wrong in the urban design of this place, and instead, believe that all of this is genuine, placed delicately and with historical accuracy. What? She and her kind cast themselves as the custodians of a long and glorious history, rather than the cynical architects of a kitsch anachronistic city. This is Skopje, real, because she says so.

It all reaches a zenith of absurdity with the caravels. In the capital of this landlocked tiny country, great fake pirate ships like alien spaceships fallen from the stars perch on stacks in the shallow river. No such ship could ever actually sail here.

But you'll thank Skopje soon, for giving you a shot in the arm, a baffling puzzle to ignite your intellect, when things on your trip were starting to become flat, stretched out, drained of colour, like the endless plains of Serbia-Hungary-Romania. This madness falls on you like the lyrical, dancing words of a fairytale, all the more so when your tour guide describes the Macedonian people as 'the Hobbits of the Balkans' - peace-loving, wanting to be left alone to vibe in their mountains. Some reading this might think that self-identification is a fairytale, a lie, in and of itself. But aren't we all self-constructing, lying, to each other all the time anyway?Baca lagi