Before I embarked on my trip to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, on that spring day of 2013, I had some idea what I would find there. Croatian and European newspapers were entertaining their readers for months by publishing photographs of the Skopje 2014 project, which had been envisioned by the ruling VMRO party and its leader Nikola Gruevski at the beginning of this decade. I saw the photos of flashy white monuments and statues of the great historical figures, including an equestrian statue of a warrior – allegedly Alexander the Great – over which Macedonia and Greece had started a historiographical, media, and diplomatic war.