ABSTRACT
The Museum of the Macedonian Struggle for Independence is certainly the most outspoken museal project in recent Macedonian history. The initial exhibition and museum building attracted many visitors ever since it opened to the public in 2011, surpassing the expectations of its creators and immediately becoming the most visited museum in today’s North Macedonia. However, the public reception of the Museum, from the very first moment of communicating the project idea in 2006, is far from uniform and favourable. In this chapter, we focus on the comments in the Museum’s visitor books from the early phase of its functioning (2011–2014), an aspect that we identified as missing in both the public and the scholarly debates about the Museum and yet immensely telling for the museum project in the focus of the research and the memory politics in the state in general. This chapter hence provides a closer look at one of the most prominent cultural legacies of the second VMRO-DPMNE rule.
