Skopje joins Ministry effort to complete Mother Teresa monument on Macedonia Square
City and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism agree to coordinate work and prepare a tender to finish the €5.5m monument on Macedonia Square.
The City of Skopje has agreed to participate in completing the contested Mother Teresa monument on Macedonia Square, saying the two institutions will coordinate steps to finish the structure that has stood for years as an unfinished and obstructive construction site.
"In a joint agreement and coordination, it was determined that the structure remains under the direct authority of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, with both institutions agreeing to jointly undertake appropriate activities in order to complete the started monument," the City of Skopje said.
The next formal step is a public tender to finish the construction after the contract with the contractor "Beton" was terminated. Until now the site has been left open, overgrown and used as a dumping place, limiting movement across the square.
Background and political turns
The monument is part of the controversial "Skopje 2014" project, for which VMRO-DPMNE's government under Nikola Gruevski spent roughly 700 million euros. The official start of works on the Mother Teresa monument was in October 2015, and the construction contract was worth 5.5 million euros.
Originally announced in January 2013 as a donation from Sahara India and its owner Subrata Roy, the project passed to the ministry after Roy faced legal troubles in India; then-Minister Elizabeta Kanceska-Milevska later took over the initiative. After SDSM came to power in 2017, the new government created a working group that concluded the concrete illegal construction should be demolished because it violated laws and posed a safety risk to the central square. However, during its eight years in office the SDSM government did not remove the structure and at one point preferred a design competition to find a completion plan — a proposal critics, including then-mayor Petre Shilegov and experts, opposed.
Now the newly returned VMRO-DPMNE-led government intends to finish the monument together with the City of Skopje. Authorities still face decisions about costs, a new contractor and how to restore the public space currently occupied by the partially built work.
Photo: SDK.MK)
