Wandering around Belgrade, I ran into the Hells Angels of Serbia’s clubhouse. I tried its door to find it locked. Weeks later, I discovered the Hillbillies MC’s pub, so I went in, had a couple beers and looked around. Their logo featured a bearded, smiling skull in front of red wings.
Most of the “doom crew” were middle-aged, hirsute and tattooed. The owner wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a pony tail. Over the bar was a painting of a near naked chick draped over a bike. From a wall, Motorhead’s Lemmy stared everyone down, looking badassed in his black cowboy hat. Most tellingly, just about every sign, message, slogan or joke was in English. “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON DRINKING.” “LEGENDS NEVER DIE.” “ROUTE U.S. 66.” “ROUTE 69 / SEX KING OF THE ROAD.”
Now nearly anyone anywhere can sort of become anything, so why not be an American redneck, black rapper or Warholian metrosexual, etc.? It wasn’t that long ago when only a few could even choose a different colored shirt.
There’s a Serbian singer named Sandra Afrika. Though augmented with decently bulbous ghetto ass, her twerking isn’t quite, well, sista quality. Reinvention has its limits.
A nation can also undergo an extreme makeover, such as after an invasion, revolution or liberation. In the weird case of North Macedonia, its capital got a lurid facelift under the direction of prime minister Nikola Gruevski. With Skopje 2014, dozens of pseudo Greek buildings and hundreds of Hellenic statues were plopped onto the nation’s capital, as if by a drunken Zeus.
In this country of two million, at least two thirds are Slavs, with most of the rest Albanians, Turks and Gypsies. There are few Greeks. Still, downtown Skopje is now jammed with fluted columns, voluted capitals, acanthuses, pediments and friezes, with everything huge and towering, if only made of concrete and not marble. It’s everything Greek super-sized, but done on a budget.
As for statues, they grace promenades, lawns, cornices, bridges, columns, between columns, niches and grand pedestals. The most colossal is of Alexander the Great, sword raised, riding a rearing Bucephalas. Lording over a vast square, it’s on a round platform atop a fat, banded and relief-laden column, rising from a circular fountain. Streams of dancing water noisily arc in. At the column’s base are eight sword or lance-wielding warriors, with the latter evoking the fearsome Macedonian phalanxes. Eight lions, twice life-sized, stand or sit, with four squirting water from their roaring mouths.
Half a kilometer away is a giant statue of Philip II, and he, too, is atop a column in the middle of a fountain, with warriors and lions. At its base, Philip reappears with Olympias and a boy Alexander.
Nearby, there’s a fountain dedicated just to Olympias, but with four women shown, it’s not clear how. Three are pampering children. One is pregnant. To blunt Greek charges of cultural appropriation, it was briefly renamed Fountain of the Mothers of Macedonia.
Now, there’s a backtracking, appeasing plaque, “In honor of Olympias, a historic figure belonging to the ancient Hellenic history and civilization and to the world cultural and historic heritage.” Far from exuding pride, it sounds like lawyerspeak. Similar plaques front other statues, with “Hellenic” sometimes scratched out by pissed locals.
Why celebrate Olympias at all? Perhaps unfairly, she’s best known for sleeping with snakes. Plutarch, “Once, moreover, a serpent was found lying by Olympias as she slept, which more than anything else, it is said, abated Philip’s passion for her; and whether he feared her as an enchantress, or thought she had commerce with some god, and so looked on himself as excluded, he was ever after less fond of her conversation.” You’d be abated too, buddy. Worse, she may have been complicit in Philip’s assassination.
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