One interesting travelogue recently focused on the land-locked country to Greece’s immediate north, the one-time Yugoslav republic known today – in some quarters and especially in Greece – as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (fYRoM).

The neophyte’s country’s leadership has, since 1991, insisted on the “Republic of Macedonia”.

For atlasobscura.com, however, the capital of this previous rump of failed Yugoslavia, Skopje, is described in an article entitled “How to build a fake ancient city in just five years”.

“…The tiny country has long traded barbs with Greece in its quest to reclaim the third-century B.C. conqueror Alexander the Great as a native son — the capital’s airport was renamed Skopje Alexander the Great Airport not long ago — and even to officially call itself Macedonia (which is also a region in northern Greece),” the article reads.

The only thing one could add to this paragraph is that the “region in northern Greece” isn’t “also” Macedonia — actually, it’s the original, the land that more closely approximates geographical and historical Macedonia. But no one is perfect.

“The mix-and-match period statues face a series of columned buildings bedecked with nymphs and fronted by fountains designed to evoke the ancient world, but constructed starting in 2010. Enhanced by light shows, the buildings are more reminiscent of that other monument to modern classicism, CaesarsPalace in Las Vegas, than they are to the Athenian Agora. The price for all this historical kitsch? Estimates of the construction costs range from 200 million euros to 500 million euros,” is another choice paragraph.

Surely a “style troika” and a western civilization history class, or two, in any reputable university could help.