Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Rampaging Al (Skopje)

 


It needed to be gotten down. The matter quickly slipped otherwise after the first 5 -10 minutes acclimatising back on the street. Prior to that passing by one reels, skitters, mutters and shakes the head. An onlooker would wonder to themselves, especially given the fine panama.

It was the gigantism first of all around the river, and then the proliferation in reduced form radiating out into the inner ring. The heroic items were the worst offenders, none more so than Big Al on his rearing steed in the centre of the chief plaza. That landmark piece stood in gargantuan bulk, raised highest toward the clouds in the middle of a ceaseless fountain with 3 - 4 dozen gushing spouts. Other spouts there issued from seven lions arranged on the perimeter, likewise outsize.

The chocolate coating meant this could not be bronze, but some kind of amalgam.

When Frane back in Melbourne was sent a pic as a tease the man was made to wonder. Precisely the same galloping steed with the great Croat statesman / lawmaker whatnot Jelacic mounted graced central Zagreb, according to Frane. For some reason the colouring of the red & white North Macedonian flag on a pole in the middle distance did not transmit properly in the mail.

Where are you? Where is this? Where did you get Maxim Gorki? (Sent in a follow-up pic.)

Big Al brandishing his long sword, reins comfortably in the left. Little wonder the conquest of half the known world in very quick time back then, judging from this example.

The terrible earthquake that levelled a good deal of Skopje occurred in 1963. God forbid should any kind of second follow the crash of big Al on the plaza outside the Marriott Hotel would itself register on the Richter.

Father Phil stood on the other side of the Vardar, the old Stone Bridge leading directly. While not quite matching his son’s tonnage, Phil too was something.

Understandably, there was daylight between the pair of giants and the lesser roundabout. Cyril & Methodius probably ranked next at around two-thirds size. Then fighters from the wars against the Turks, martyrs, statesman, lawgivers and indeterminate notables. Some church fathers and other indeterminates otherwise. (Some of the IDs had slipped from the pedestals and many had never been specified.)

Oh golly! A painter clutching three brushes against the pallet on his chest was discovered near the Archeological Museum. Unnamed. Possibly locals could make the identification.

Maternal wonders near Phillip occupied another large fountain, one of them heavily pregnant. The ladies being all comfortably seated was pretty clearly revisionist history, as the Macedonians were no better than the Montenegrins, the menfolk traditionally mounted on donkeys, while the women carted the firewood, water, &etc.

Stone Bridge was the oldest crossing over the river, rebuilt on the old foundations numerous times across the centuries. In its centre electric young gypsies thrashed little drums that carried hundreds of metres, well past Alex on one side and into the fortress on the rise on the other. Sometimes the gypsy seniors gathered in passing it seemed and put on what appeared an impromptu a dance, simply taken by the rhythm. Brilliantly vivacious kids.

As the days past, after numerous and closer inspections of the specimens along the river and over the pair of new bridges, the other only slightly enlarged sculptures of nameless other heroes, the fuller picture emerged.

            The clear hint was given on the bridges and their flanks. All along there the pieces were of the precise same size, produced in the same factory at the same time, special order. Dating from around thirty years ago was the first guess. Mid-90s, shortly after the collapse of the Second Yugoslav Federation. (The Royalist was the first, formed at the same time as the Czechoslovak union.)

After the fragmentation and the hurried nation-building, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia and all the others were in need of new / old symbols fitted for current requirements. Along the waters of the Vardar in Skopje and over the pedestrian bridges in particular, the civic spaces were thickly filled. Copiously. No stone had been left unturned.

With the decision for such numbers the task became unique, individual expressions, character defining gestures and postures. Here every effort was made: the contemplative chin clasp, hand on heart, half akimbo, hand behind back; the stretched arm making the key point, crossed in front, head confidently upraised, bowed. Concerns of State understandably predominated.

Abstracted, turned aside statesman were reserved for the bridge leading to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The Archaeological Museum gathered the earlier eras, classical & Roman / Renaissance.

By some good fortune the old Stone Bridge was left completely unadorned. There had been some curbing there. Someone of the committee had eloquently spoken and carried the day against the prevailing opinion.

The Great Al and his dad the other side could not be crowded with helots either. Again someone with heft had insisted on the point and held out. Amidst all the rest of it that was a notable accomplishment.

The Archeological Museum and the Public Prosecutor’s Office was split by the  Electrical Communication Agency, where an Adonis & his Consort clutching a dove to her covered breast again in massive form flanked the entry doors. (Foreign Affairs was one further along.)

All three buildings were instant classics from the years following the example of the Parthenon and later resurgence, commissioned and built at the same time as the statuary.

Sixty-five or seventy feet the columns of the Archeological rose, closely spaced.

The other pedestrian bridge leading to the PP gathered only suits and mostly half-length coats, some removed. The pieces here were more recently produced, it seemed, with only faint traces of oxidisation. All the figures on the Archeol Bridge were thoroughly saturated by the green smears.

Well, the dating turned out wrong. The bronze notice of the Archeological bridge noted 2012 construction.

Going back to the other, surprisingly the Bridge of Civilizations in Macedonia dated a year later. Either its statuary had been commissioned quite some years earlier, or the patina had been added for authenticity.

On the streets nearby there was the more common urban sculpture. A classic bearded mendicant—homeless the tag added—could have been confused with one of the more modest church fathers. Musicians on the corner near the Art Hotel, where a room was reluctantly taken after a long slog from the railway station, included a jolly drunk raising his bottle. Near the smiling shoe shine lad down on his stool on Makedonija, the chief pedestrian mall, a real one set up shop. The brash, confident gal striding onward with head flung back chatting to an intimate on her phone deserved the attention of the art terrorist cell in Skopje.

 




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