Macedonia’s latest tourist attraction is a holiday in a polluted environment, national media reported on November 14, although evidence suggests the tourist offer is in fact fake.

The newest department of the OKTA Oil Refinery, situated just outside of the capital Skopje, is the OKTA Tourism Agency, which offers a visit to the first village in the world that makes possible a holiday in a polluted environment, the Macedonia newspaper Vecher reported in mid-November.

The range of tourist packages advertised on the agency’s website include: a two-day safari (cost – 135 USD), to observe “new breeds of animals and plants in their natural habitat”; trekking exploration of the area (cost - 40 USD), which affords “a visual extravaganza of toxins across rivers and valleys” and the chance to “gather it [the toxins?] in bio-hazard boxes and keep it as mementos”; a night-time visual spectacle (cost – 50 USD) of “the spectral nightlights by the emissions of the factory” that take one “to another dimension,” described as “Macedonia’s Aurora Borealis” (Northern Lights); and a three-day stay with the villages (cost – 90 USD), “where you get to experience the pollution first hand.”

Today’s publication in Vecher also mentioned a BBC News article about the OKTA travel packages from August 17, 2007. In it, Yoanis Marakis, the PR representative of OKTA, is quoted as saying: “Okta Village Tourism is really at the forefront of new tourism initiatives on the world and will surely put Macedonia on the tourist map of the world. It has so much to offer for people looking for a new and extreme experience.”

However, a check by BalkanTraveller.com on Friday found that the published information is most likely false and the OKTA travel agency and its packages are fictitious. For starters, the agency’s website is not fully functional, with many parts of it inserted simply as images instead of active links. Also, repeated calls to the four telephone numbers provided under the “Contacts” section of the site proved they were non-existent.

In addition, while screen shots of the BBC News article and a similar article in the New York Times were published on the travel agency’s website, no such articles were found in the two media’s official archives.

Judging from the comments to the article published in Vecher, some of the newspapers’ readers also questioned the information’s legitimacy. One of them suggested that the website is the work of “Greek hackers,” who seek to paint an image of Macedonia drowning in poison.

Although, upon first sight, the fabricated information serves to give Macedonia a bad image, upon closer inspection it may in fact be ruining Greece’s prestige. Since 1999, the Greek company Hellenic Petroleum has owned 54 per cent of the OKTA oil refinery. If the area around it is highly polluted, then logically the responsibility for the environmental damage would lie with the Greek company.

The authenticity of the site remains to be properly assessed, as do the people standing behind it and their aims.

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