Patriot games
Which people are the true descendants of the greatest military commander in history? Fiachra Gibbons reports on how Oliver Stone's epic Alexander is reigniting an ancient, bitter feud.
Friday November 19, 2004
The Guardian
"We will come and kill you in your beds, cut your throats, and wipe you from the face of the earth ... if Alexander the Great were alive today he would grind you gypsy dogs into the dust, dig your dead from their graves and silence forever your filthy language that insults his name ..."
Internet chatrooms have never been the most decorous of forums but even in the free-for-all that is cyberspace, those dedicated to discussing Oliver Stone's new film, Alexander, are a case apart.
Since the combative director of JFK chose to make his first foray into historical epics with a biopic of the most fought-over figure of the ancient world, rivers of blood have been spilt - figuratively at least - in a propaganda battle between Greek and Macedonian nationalists over who has the right to claim the all-conquering hero as their own.
This very modern ethnic turf war is being fought with tortuously argued historical blogs about which Macedonia Alexander conquered the known world for - a tiny new Balkan republic that has only recently come to see itself as the keeper of his flame, or a province that was officially known as "Northern Greece" until the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia declared itself independent and bagged the name.
But the real blood and guts of the battle, the part Alexander would have so enjoyed, is in the chatrooms, where fanatical foot- soldiers taunt each other with blood-curdling threats heavy with echoes of the short but brutish Balkan wars that carved up ancient land between Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria almost a century ago.
Stone has remained uncharacteristically silent, preferring to wrestle on set with war elephants and his leading man, Colin Farrell. Even for such a seasoned controversialist, this is a scrap to stand back from.
For the struggle over who have the right to call themselves descendents of the greatest military commander in history, and the first real western imperialist, is neither pretty nor edifying. In the early 1990s, Greece nearly invaded the newborn Republic of Macedonia for "stealing" Alexander's symbol, the Star of Vergina, for its flag, as well as the White Tower in the Greek Macedonian capital of Thessaloniki for its banknotes, something the millions of ordinary Greeks who took to the streets saw as "blatant acts of aggression".
The flag and the banknotes were hastily withdrawn, but Greek pride was far from restored. To the horror of its European partners, Athens briefly contemplated carving up its defenceless northern neighbour with the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. In the end, Greece stepped back, choosing instead to blockade the tiny republic of barely two million people in an attempt to strangle it at birth. Since then millions have been spent on a war of attrition to claim the name - and Alexander - back.
You cannot walk more than a few hundred metres in any town in northern Greece without tripping over a new statue, bust or monument to Alexander, who extended the Hellenic world as far as India in the fourth century BC with such slaughter that even today in Iran and central Asia his name is used to scare unruly children. You will find the most pointed statue of all at the border with Macedonia at Niki - named after the Greek god of victory - where a giant Alexander angrily brandishes a javelin at the upstart state across the frontier.
All over Greek Macedonia, streets, schools and airports have been hastily renamed, while archaeologists, having all but ignored ancient Macedonia until relatively recently, are digging furiously for its traces. The spectacular tomb of Alexander's father, Phillip, at Vergina near Thessaloniki, and the city's revamped museum, hammer home the kingdom's Greekness.
Still, passions had cooled somewhat after an unhappy compromise over the name that burdened Skopje with the cumbersome temporary moniker of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or "Fyrom" for short. Greek investment also began to build bridges - until Stone and his army of Hollywood stars appeared on the horizon to put nationalists on both sides back on a hair-trigger.
It is into this fraught and febrile atmosphere that George W Bush has now wandered. With the world waiting and wondering where the president will start the next war, Bush chose as his first major foreign-policy decision of his second term to recognise Fyrom by its "proper" name as the Republic of Macedonia, prompting paroxysms of Greeks anger across the globe and Athens to vow to block Macedonia's entry into the EU and Nato.
Even before Bush's intervention, the very mention of the M-word in Greek Macedonia risked a stern lecture on how it has been Greek since antiquity. I nearly lost an ear to a particularly patriotic barber in Thessaloniki last month when I mentioned that I had just arrived from the "other Macedonia".
Those people are not Macedonian, he raged. "That is a Slav lie. We are the real Macedonians. They are prostitutes and Gypsies and worse than Albanians," he declared. His family, it turned out, were recent Greek immigrants from Georgia 
who, he claimed, went "east with Alexander". He liked to take his son on Sundays to the massive equestrian statue of Alexander on the city's seafront promenade, where Greek right-wingers gathered after Bush's bombshell to burn American and Macedonian flags. "I tell him to be proud of his ancestors and how lucky he is to have returned to the land of his forefathers."
But ask anyone four hours north in Skopje what Alexander was and they will smile sheepishly and say, "Macedonian, of course!" And when pressed about the obvious absurdity of a country that has a majority Slavic population claiming a man who was born nearly 1,000 years before the first Slav appeared in Macedonia, they answer, "Well, he was certainly not Greek."
If the Macedonians were Greek, why did Alexander have to address his troops in both Greek and ancient Macedonian, they argue. And every dog can quote the Athenian orator Demosthenes' famous condemnation of Alexander's father Philip as "not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honour, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave."
"No one is saying that Alexander spoke modern Macedonian, that is ridiculous, but who is to say that there isn't something of him still floating around in the genome," says Vojislav Sarakinski, a lecturer in ancient history at the city's main Cyril and Methodius university. It is easy to ridicule all this as archetypical Balkan lunacy until you realise how much of the emotional heat of the dispute stems from the insecurity of both countries about their borders, fears fully justified by the region's recent history.
Stone has been well aware of these sensitivities from the start, though initial Greek outrage at his film focused on Alexander's omnivorous sexuality, in particular his fondness for eunuchs. His film, he insists, is purely about the historical "man god", and so has made no secret of showing Alexander's love for his friend Hephaestion. There is, however, none of the lurid decadence promised from Baz Luhrmann's planned film about Alexander, if it ever gets off the blocks.
Evangelos Venizelos, the formidable former Greek culture minister and a Macedonian, attempted to get Stone onside early on, offering him Greek locations and the use of the army for battle scenes, but the director demurred and instead diplomatically chose locations far away from controversy in Morocco and Thailand. Confronted with angry MPs unhappy with what they were hearing about Alexander's bisexuality, Venizelos despaired, "What can I do? It's Hollywood."
Generally, though, most Greeks see the Stone film as a chance to strike a blow against Skopje, given that it is based on the biography by the Oxford academic Robin Lane Fox, whom both sides see as a Hellenist.
None of the previous, deeply disappointing attempts to bring Alexander's extraordinary life to the screen have had to walk the same tightrope because, until Skopje broke away from Belgrade in 1991, Alexander's origins were not in dispute. In fact he barely figured in the old Yugoslav textbooks, and even in Greece he was something of a forgotten figure - relegated to the second and third division of Hellenic heroes behind Pericles, the great philosophers, and warriors such as Leonidas. While the great Greek director Theo Angelopoulos dealt obliquely with him in his film about a 19th-century Macedonian brigand, Megalexandros, there has been no biopic in either country.
"Alexander lived long before nationalism and so is our common hero," says Vasil Tupurkovski, a former deputy president, who has written four popular histories about him. "He would be laughing at us arguing about him now."
Ah, but would he be laughing in Greek or Macedonian? Professor Nade Proeva, the expert on ancient Macedonia in Skopje, thinks both. "Alexander certainly spoke and wrote Greek, but then it was the lingua franca of the time, like English is now. I speak French but that does not make me French."
With such treacherous ground to negotiate, and amid thunderous lobbying from both sides, Stone has chosen a remarkably adroit middle course. His masterstroke has been to give Alexander and the men of the Macedonian phalanxes Irish accents, while the Greeks speak clipped English RP.
Macedonians of all complexions are content with this, each convinced it favours their cause. So in another two millennia when people ponder again the origins of the mysterious Macedonian who emerged from the southern Balkans to rule the world at 25, they will turn their ears to Colin Farrell's guttural brogue and conclude that he was in fact a Dubliner.
· Alexander opens in the US next week and in the UK in January.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1353954,00.html
