Despot (& other) Statues

◄ ▲ There’s something about statues of despots, eventually somebody wants to pull them down. The fictional gold statue of Donald Trump which pops up in the Gaza Trump spoof video looks like a prime candidate for toppling. Doesn’t it look remarkably like a Saddam Hussein statue being hauled to the ground in Iraq, after the silly invasion? Although admittedly with more gold plating.

◄ it’s curious how little imagination despot statue designers have. Take Abraham Lincoln’s – definitely not a despot’s – classic seated-statue in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

◄ Any relation to Kim Il Sung’s seated statue in Pyongyang, North Korea?

I certainly encountered plenty of heroic statues on my travels around North Korea in 2002, but in 2017 I was equally impressed with the absurd statues in Ashgabat in Turkemenistan a country I thought could really have been named Absurdistan.

◄ Or to Albanian despot Enver Hoxha’s seated statue in The Pyramid in Tirana, the capital of Albania. The Pyramid’ was built in 1988 as a memorial for the beloved dictator by his architectural daughter. Hoxha quickly became much less beloved although he had the foresight to die before becoming seriously discredited. His seated statue was quickly torn down along with every other Hoxha statue in the country.

In 2021 The Independent in London and the New York Times both had articles about the woman in Albania who was still looking after what may be the last intact statue of the dictator, hidden away in her village back yard.

▲ The Pyramid today has been considerably tidied up, it stood more-or-less derelict for many years but there’s certainly no sign of Enver Hoxha today.

I’m always interested in the statues I encounter on my travels. I recently posted on statues I met as I was walking the Thames Path route in London. Or a few years ago I noted how well endowed Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, was with heroic statues. In Budapest in Hungary I visited Statue Park where unwanted Soviet-era statues – all those images of Lenin – were given a second lease of life as tourist attractions. What to do with old images of Lenin is a problem in other places which were once under the Soviet thumb. And it’s not just despots, in 2020 I regretted the four innocent ‘slave girls’ facing removal from in front of the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, Ireland because cancel culture enthusiasts were not enthusiastic about slavery.

◄ Then there are statues that simply get cancelled for other reasons. Poor Kylie Minogue didn’t prance for long at Docklands in Melbourne before she was moved to make way for a new apartment building. Why she couldn’t have simply been shifted 50 metres to the side is not explained and although it is definitely not a very impressive statue Kylie is in storage and there are regular appeals to have her brought out and put back on display.

◄ Melbourne’s other really famous woman, Dame Edna Everage, also had a statue at Docklands for a spell. A spectacularly unattractive statue and Dame Edna’s creator and alter-ego, Barry Humphries, was very happy when she was shifted away, presumably for another apartment construction.

Few Melbourne statues have been shifted around, hidden away and brought out again as often as the hapless (and doomed) Victorian era explorers Burke and Wills. In 2010 I made the trek to Cooper Creek in Queensland where their epic attempt to cross Australia came to its tragic end. Their statue is scheduled to come out of storage and go back on display sometime soon.