Like most landmarks in any capital, the Runner has its admirers and its detractors. At more than 12 metres high, the 70-ton monument opposite Athens’ Hilton hotel is hard to miss. But whether Greeks love it or hate it, the gargantuan glass statue has become a fixture that few are willing to part with.

No one knows this better than Costas Varotsos, the internationally acclaimed artist who sculpted the work known locally as the Dromeas – after the Greek word for runner – in the 1990s. His phone has been ringing off the hook since the Greek culture minister, Myrsini Zorba, purportedly proposed that the celebrated work should leave Greece in a cultural exchange that has exercised the nation, not least because the recipient country would have been the newly renamed North Macedonia.

“To say I was shocked would be an understatement,” the artist says, recalling his visit to Zorba’s office where the politician suggested the Runner be traded for a statue of Alexander the Great on a steed.

“I thought she had wanted to talk about cultural policy. Instead, she began saying: ‘I have this idea to move the Runner to Skopje, which is a beautiful city, you’d love it, and I wanted to know what you think.’”

The mild-mannered sculptor admits he was incensed at first. Then, he says, he found himself laughing because the idea “was just so surreal”.

“I am all for friendship with our neighbour but the Runner is a work that belongs to Athens and its people, so without hesitation I instantly said: ‘Forget it,’” he told the Guardian.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The artist Costas Varotsos says the Runner belongs to Athens and its people. Photograph: Martin Garnham/Alamy

Varotsos, whose artworks grace cities across Europe and the US, might not have gone public with the story had Zorba not infuriated the 63-year-old by initially denying he had ever visited her office.

“I would have considered our conversation a private matter but first she denied she had ever called me and then she lied again, denying she had made such a proposal, and that got me mad,” he says. “Luckily I bumped into other artists at the ministry so I had witnesses.”

Few cultural disputes – with the exception of the trenchant row over the British Museum’s retention of the Parthenon marbles – have exercised Greeks as much. In a nation humiliated by the depredations of years of economic crisis, and still smarting over the leftist government’s historic naming agreement with North Macedonia, the proposal has hit an unexpectedly raw nerve.

The spectre of the Runner being exchanged for a “kitsch” statue of Alexander the Great, the ancient warrior king widely seen as having been filched by their Slav neighbours as part of a cultural war to assert their claim to the name Macedonia, has added insult to injury. Last week unionists laid flowers at the foot of the statue under a billboard decrying what is perceived as the readiness of the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to sell off the debt-stricken state’s cultural heritage.

“You leave, he will stay,” the pro-opposition Phileleftheros newspaper fumed in a banner front-page headline beside a picture of the Runner. “The minister ought to give an explanation. Was this her idea, or was she conveying an order?” it asked in an editorial. “The prime minister ought to give explanations, too, because it seems the delivery boy is willing to give away whatever this country has and doesn’t have.”

Speculation has mounted that the exchange could have been announced as an act of friendship when Tsipras, who has been nominated alongside his Macedonian counterpart Zoran Zaev for the Nobel peace prize, makes his first official visit to Skopje next month. After holding talks in Brussels with his counterpart, Nikola Dimitrov, the Greek foreign minister Giorgos Katrougalos insisted on Monday it was the “wish of both sides to implement the letter and the spirit of the agreement”.

But while Dimitrov emphasised the historic pact showed the two countries were “on the right side of history”, Skopje has also denied there was any suggestion of the Greek capital’s most famous contemporary sculpture heading to the city.

Under the controversial deal in which the former Republic of Macedonia was rechristened North Macedonia in January, Skopje has promised “to take appropriate corrective action” and either rename or remove statues and monuments inspired by ancient Greek figures, including Alexander and his father, Philip, that have proliferated across the capital.

Athens had been at loggerheads with its tiny neighbour since the former Yugoslav republic proclaimed independence, laying claim to a name Greeks argued not only usurped their history and cultural identity but conveyed territorial ambitions against their own adjacent province of Macedonia.

Most of the public artworks were constructed as part of a 10-year-long nationalist building frenzy by the country’s former rightwing government.

“We don’t even want them,” Skopje’s mayor, Petre Shilegov, told the Guardian as the Balkan state prepared to hold a referendum on the name. “We are talking about hundreds of statues that cost €680m. It was totally crazy and unnecessary. Even Disneyland has a concept but this had none whatsoever because we don’t have ancient roots and it compromised our history.”

In Athens there is little desire for any of the works either. A statue of Alexander the Great carved by a Greek sculptor and stored in a warehouse for the last 26 years because of the name row is expected to be erected by the mayor of Athens not far from the Runner.