With only two weeks to go ahead of the first papal visit to the Republic of Macedonia, the authorities of Skopje appear unable, or even unwilling due to political reasons, to maintain the capital and the numerous buildings and squares built by the Nikola Gruevski administration.

The scene at the Philip II of Macedon square is one of complete neglect and destruction. The central fountain is filled with trash and the last time some water flowed there was in October.

Across the river, the large splash fountain in front of the Alexander the Great monument, which was beloved by the children, also remains unused, and the Alexander fountain is dry as well. Further down the river, the bridge fountain in front of the Archaeology Museum is mothballed. The works – part of the Skopje 2014 project – were meant to turn Skopje into a capital city fitting of a European country and to replace its Brutalist, Communist era architecture in a Neo-Classical style.

The now ruling SDSM party promised it will tear down much of the buildings and monuments commissioned by Gruevski and the VMRO-DPMNE Government. As this seems as too much work, after a while SDSM settled into a routine – the monuments and buildings stay put, but will be left to decay.

One of the planned features, a grand monument to Mother Teresa, was unfinished when SDSM took over the Government in 2017, and construction was promptly stoped. Pope Francis will visit the previously built house dedicated to the Catholic saint, at the site where she had one of her visions, but at the square he will be welcomed by a bare concrete bloc covered up by tarp.

Zoran Zaev’s campaign against Russian businessman Sergey Samsonenko resulted in two additional grand buildings being left unfinished – two hotels Samsonenko was building at the main Macedonia Square, including the one designed as a replica of the iconic Officer’s Hall torn down after the 1963 earthquake, have been left semi-finished for years and all work has stopped under the Zaev regime, while Samsonenko is abandoning his sponsorship of the Vardar club.

– A man who can’t create loves to destroy, laconically wrote Gruevski at his Facebook account recently.

After a major fire broke out recently in an unregulated dump site close to the Vardar river, near Alexandar Palace – one of the poshest Skopje hotels – and especially after the drubbing handed to his SDSM party at the presidential elections, Skopje Mayor Petre Silegov sprung to action today. He invited TV crews to film him picking up cigarette butts in one of the districts of Skopje where SDSM lost by a particularly large margin. Silegov was also promising a new park at the Alexandar Palace dump site and blamed citizens of creating, “on average, 8.6 percent more waste in 2018 compared to 2017”. “You had two years to do something”, VMRO-DPMNE replied to the Mayor.