Balkan airports

"New york (no-one from abroad flies to La Guardia)"

Not quite true.

There are flights from Canada and the Caribbean

I want to recall the wrong opinion of Albania being a Muslim country. We are mostly and atheist country with many religions that do not have a majority on their own. We are the only country in the region with this feature and we love that feature as our religion is Albanianism.

"brianL001" where are you coming from when you are so intelligent to (indirectly) here claim that peoples from the former Yugoslavia are are stupid or have no sense of logic? According to sound of your comment I would say Britain or the US. If you are from Anglo-Saxon world, please do us a favor and stop writing comments. I you are from this dimension please also do read about various genocides your ancestors committed. Have a look what you countries have done to peoples around the globe from slavery to nukes in Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq... and than look yourself in a mirror and ask yourself do you really have any basis to preach anyone anything.

Geographically located in Eastern Europe and cultural Balkan, Greece has been on a renaming spree since the late 1980s

Mikra Airport in Thessaloniki (also known as Solun or Selanik) was renamed Makedonia in the early 1990s amongst a number of other public places to be renamed.

Also a number of prefectures were renamed to include the word Macedonia in its name which was known as the Ministry of Northern Greece until August 1988

@Metohija,

Jashari died in 1998, Kosovo was liberated in 1999, so any camparison between Milosevic and Jashari reeks of ignorance. Jashari cannot be blamed why some thousands Serbs left Kosovo after 1999.

Jashari and 70 members of his family were killed by the Serbian police and security forces. The list of the dead includes women and children. The Serbs spared no one.

You don't have to be in favor of Kosovo independence to show sympathy for this horrible tragedy and to avoid the bad taste of comparing Jashari, a non-politician, freedom-loving villager, with Milosevic, a corrupt dictator who fundamentally hurt his own country for his political interests and those of the oligarchic mafia connected to him.

Should that have made me curious about flying into Podgorica? Anyway, there are also no flights between Belgrade and Split, which can cause some frustration.

Until recently, Britain did better at naming those mundane things called roads because when they did refer to a person they just used the surname (E.g. Gordon St). Continental Europe (and the rest of the world?) seemed to me to be making a mistake by using the full name, which makes the link to a particular individual (and associated emotions) much stronger. Unfortunately in recent years Britain seems to have started copying the rest of the world (E.g. Nelson Mandela Avenue)

Pace vzdevek I would answer @wiretap that everybody calls JFK "JFK" and not "John F Kennedy".

How funny to read "At first, friends of Macedonia thought [calling their airport Alexander the Great] must be some sort of one-off joke". If one was truly a friend of the so-called Republic of Macedonia they'd know that their recent creation of a "Macedonian" national identity, based on an ancient Greek kingdom and dynasty, is a joke in itself.

As Cleopatra was the last of the native Greek-speaking monarchs, descended from the Ptolemaic Macedonian dynasty, I wouldn't be surprised if they renamed the main square of Skopje after her.

you have to be really but really out to compare adem jashari with milosevic!! at least read some history books before you write such things!
lately poles are petitioning for a mistake that some us journalist mada by writing "Polish concentration camps", that is the same mistake that you are making in this article.
is fidel castro = bill clinton?
is kim jong = david cameron?
is causevski = merkel?
is sadam hussein = sarkozy?
that is the same logic.
the problem is that too many people thing loudly today and in this case some of them can write in such prestigious media like economist.

@mikeinwarsaw

Do not worry, no-one is trying to do PR on people like you, that would (unfortunately) be indeed "meaningless and worthless", as you point out yourself.

The naming after nationally important figures has a meaning for the local population itself, of course.

--------------------
@wiretap

"So, what do they call it? It only has one name."

JFK = New york (no-one from abroad flies to La Guardia)
CGD = Paris Roissy

*which by no means they are!

@mikeinwarsaw
There are quite a lot of airports named after oustanding personalities in other parts of the world, West, East, North and South. Which you as an experienced air-traveller should know - if you cared a little more about 'the locals'. Some examples which come to my mind at the moment - apart from Kennedy and de Gaulle airports already mentioned as exceptions, which by no means they are not! Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport, Berlin Tegel Otto Lilienthal Airport, Aeroporto Leonardo da Vinci di Fiumicino, Ben Gurion International Airport, Galileo Galilei Airport, Houari Boumediene Airport. There are more.

I agree however that these names do not have to matter in international flights coding, for the reasons of simplicity. For the passanger though the three-letter code is not that much important as for the airline operators.

One passanger, aware that he is flying to, say Wałęsa Airport in Gdańsk, gets an idea that Wałęsa he might have heard about on the news years ago, did what he did in Gdańsk. The other just smoothly flies to GDN.

Regards from WAW

@ Forlana
Warsaw airport
Warsaw-Modlin airport
London-Heathrow
London-Gatwick
London-Stanstead
London-Luton
Paris-Orly
Paris-Le Bourget
Paris-CGD
Moscow-Sheremetyevo
and so on.....
The fact that local (often municipal) authorities label an airport eg Kraków-Balice as JohnPaulII does not mean that International Airport call signs recognise such naming. JFK in New York and Paris CDG are the exceptions to the general rule.
If you ever travel by air (I do so frequently) you will note on your airticket the designated three letter code for your departure and arrival airports: they are place related. Anything else is just a meaningless and worthless attempt at PR.

Reading the comments of your Albanian readers, I'm appalled at how shortsighted their views of Jashari and Milosevic are. Hitler? Jews? What nonsense. Ethnic cleansing is awful, and the Serbs were justly punished for it. Albanians, in turn, got a country out of it. But whatever. At least, have the decency to acknowledge the simple fact that the vast majority of Kosovan Serbs left Kosovo not because they were loved, tolerated and treated as equals - but because they are, to this date, persecuted and discriminated against. Much in the same way the Albanians themselves were discriminated against during Milosevic's rule (for reference, see mobbings of 2004, stoning of the returning Serbs in Zac, etc.). The parallels between Milosevic's and Jashari's methods are not lost on those who see the other side...Still, let it be known that no airport in Serbia or anywhere the Serbs live in majority has ever been named after Milosevic.

Luckily Sofia's airport is simply Sofia Airport. Let's keep it this way.

I red carefully all the comments one by one and the article itself as well.
The article was OK and usefull with info provided. But it may be qualified as two extreme sides (+ and -), that at least in a media such as The Economist shouldn't allow to be published in that way, where criminels are compared with victims (i.e Adem Jashari and his family with Slobodan Milosevic and his regime, is somehow comparing or equalizing Hitler with other victims' names).

If I would be the person who would decide, I won't name Balkan International Airports with local hero names or what ever unless this would the best opportunity to promote small "world" cities such are Tirana, Prishtina, Shkupi (Skopje), Belgrade, Podgorica etc..., but I would use it as a best way to promote country/ies. In this regard, I would say the only one that is internatrionaly meaningfull, is "Mother Theresa - International Airport" in Tirana/Albania.

Having in mind the article and the content of it "Is this the example where Europe wants to go?!"

If your point is that logic is in short supply in Former Yugoslavia, then wasn't that obvious long before the airport renaming? Or, if your point is that if shooting yourself in the foot were an Olympic sport, countries from former Yugoslavia would win gold, silver and bronze every time, then just the phony macedonia case proves it.

@ wiretap What is this "Anglo-Saxon" world that you and many Europeans, particularly the French, refer to? The Angles and Saxons were absorbed into the other ethincities of England following the Conquest in 1066. It would be impossible to find an Angle or a Saxon today. Do you mean "anglophone", ie English-speaking? Language is about all that is common across the anglophone world; certainly not culture, law or tradition.
And this whole idea of naming things after persons, living or dead is ridiculous. The significant thing about an airport is where it is, not what faded old pol or other local luminary it's named after.

@ wiretap What is this "Anglo-Saxon" world that you and many Europeans, particularly the French, refer to? The Angles and Saxons were absorbed into the other ethincities of England following the Conquest in 1066. It would be impossible to find an Angle or a Saxon today. Do you mean "anglophone", ie English-speaking? Language is about all that is common across the anglophone world; certainly not culture, law or tradition.
And this whole idea of naming things after persons, living or dead is ridiculous. The significant thing about an airport is where it is, not what faded old pol or other local luminary it's named after.

Interesting article. May I suggest that the Economist stop calling Albania a majority muslim country? The last religious census was right after the independence from the Ottoman Empire, so clearly many people declared themselves Muslim -- even though they may have not been -- as a way to continue with past habit of keeping two names and two religions to avoid paying taxes. What was a pragmatic strategy has now turned the country into a muslim majority. I am from Albania and my family's religious background -- though all atheists -- is Albanian Orthodox, Catholic and Sufi Muslim. My family is not exceptional as most people during communism intermarried. I would argue -- based on anecdotal evidence-- the majority of the population is of mixed religious backgrounds and hence there is no religious majority. I would argue that it is the equivalent of calling America a country with a majority British descent. The mixing of ethnic backgrounds in the US has been so extensive it would make the qualification misleading and wrong. With this view about Albania, calling the airport Mother Teresa would make perfect sense as she is part and parcel of the religiously diverse society, which has been and is Albania.

P.S. Just to clarify, I am not opposed to the qualification of a majority muslim Albania perse. I would have issue with the country being called predominantly Orthodox or Catholic Albania too.