What I can see

As can be assumed by its name, the square is dedicated to the fighters of the Macedonian Struggle, 9 of whom are honoured with lined up realistic marble busts. More specifically, the busts are dedicated to Alexandros Petridis, Georgios Volanis, Efthimios Kaoudis, Ilias Deligiannakis, Captain Kottas, Pavlos Gyparis, Dimitris Kalapothakis, Pavlos Melas and Ion Dragoumis. The busts are often vandalized with paints and spays. After the latest redesign, the square has an amphitheatrical logic and its best charactreristic is the unobstructed perspective towards a rare UNESCO World Heritage Site, the church of Our Lady Achiropiitos. The alleys are quite wide and have low planting in the flower beds on both sides. At night, the lighting of the square is quite “theatrical”.

What I can't see

There is, however, another point of view, a more nostalgic for the old square. The current square bears no resemblance to the old one and the memories that was identified with. There were tall trees, the busts were more widely distributed in space; there was also a playground, a fountain, bushes, flowers, paved areas, benches and children used to play football. By the time homeless people showed up, the municipality closed the fountain and the drinking water tap, while the first trees were also cut down. Later, the square remained a construction site for many years, due to the metro construction. For this reason, the busts were moved to other locations, which gave rise to nationalists to argue that this was a permanent removal as part of the Prespa Agreement, which – among other things – included the erga omnes constitutional renaming of the neighbouring state as the Republic of North Macedonia.

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