We really enjoyed our 5 nights in the capital of North Macedonia, but Skopje is bit weird. The history of this town really is interesting. We have been accustomed in our Eastern Europe trip to seeing ancient cities with a mix of old ruins and architectural styles from each era. Skopje is an old city with a medieval fort overlooking it but most of the town is not very old. In 1963, an earthquake destroyed most of the city so there isn’t the layers of history that we have been experiencing in other cities. In 2009, the city was a bit ….blah…. and filled with communist era brutalist buildings, so they decided to give it a high price makeover to attract tourism. The city has only about 500k residents and the whole country has only 1.8 million people. It is not a rich country, so it was a big risk to pour almost a billion dollars into a beautifying the city. The project, known as “Skopje 2014” was controversial because the country has many other needs including education, healthcare, and infrastructure. There still aren’t any trains that go to Skopje.
The project turned out to be enormous, and money was a bit tight, so it is still in progress even though it was called “Skopje 2014”. They built new buildings in different old architectural styles, they covered old buildings with fancy facades, they built bridges, created huge plazas and pedestrian streets, and then they put statues everywhere. Huge statues. We were blown away by the size and number of the statues. They also build 3 fake ships in the river that were to be used as hotels and restaurants. They created their own Arc de Triumph just because everyone else in Europe seemed to be building it. They even bought a fleet of London style double decker buses to make their lacking transportation system seem much cooler than it really is.
We stayed downtown in an nice $70 a night Airbnb on the 6th floor of an old communist era apartment building. The outside has been recovered to make it look turn of the century. The neighboring buildings were built new in the Roman Classical style. There was also a modern glass T-Mobile building that didn’t fit in with anything.
We did our usual tourist activities that have been our routine in seeing a new city. We took a “free” walking tour, we climbed to the fort on the hill, we went to some forgettable museums, we saw the mosques and churches, and we saw the enormous amount of statues. Skopje is the birthplace of Mother Theresa so we visited a plaque for her birthplace and a small memorial museum/chapel in her honor. The town also is proud to be home of Alexander the Great who led Macedonia during its brief heyday empire in the 3rd century BC. Many of the statues were celebrating that era. We also strolled through the Old Bazaar which is the Ottoman neighborhood with lots of kitschy shops and some good Turkish food. The whole time in this town we were trying to understand the city’s real identity… It is hard to figure out. But really interesting!
On Mount Varno, which is right next to town, there is a huge statue of a cross. You can get there with a short city bus ride to a cable car. It was a really nice spring Saturday so we took the ride up to the top of the mountain. It turned out to be very popular place for hiking and mountain biking. It was cool to see it being used as park for local people instead of just as a tourist attraction.
The real non-missable attraction in Skopje is the Matka Canyon. Skopje is surrounded by some beautiful nature, and the cliffs around this narrow dam-filled lake is probably the best. We again tried to take a city bus to get out to the canyon. Unfortunately, the bus stopped about 3km short of the dam so we had to walk the last little bit. We then took a boat up the beautiful lake/river to the entrance of a cave. The captain gave us 20 minutes to check out the cave which is one of the deepest caves in the world although it is mostly filled with water. It was still pretty cool. We then returned to the small village for lunch and then took a taxi back to town instead of walking and then waiting for the infrequent city bus. Overall, it was a great day and I took way too many pics again!
While Skope was not the traditional European Capital, we are still glad that we saw it. It seems a bit Disneylandish as well as Vegasy… and a lot of people are describing it as “kitschy”. I like interesting places and I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for something a bit different. Our next stop is still in North Macedonia—– Lake Ohrid!