Six Weeks in Skopje
Skopje,
capital of North Macedonia, is a strange place. It's not a large city,
with less than half a million inhabitants. The commerce is a bit
limited, and the pace of life is definitely slow. But if you go to what
is considered the center of town, around Macedonia Square, it feels like
someone tried to make it the most impressive city in Europe, and failed
miserably. It would have been fine with the two gigantic statues on
each side of the river, one of Alexander the Great on a horse and the
other of his father Philip II, connected by the very old Stone Bridge.
But then they started adding more and more statues. And another three
bridges, unnecessary and very close to each other. On top of the
bridges, more statues, dozens of them. I think there must be more than
two hundred statues in that area. If that wasn't enough they also put
three very large "pirate ships" between the bridges, to function as
restaurants. They are not real ships, just structures resting on cement
pillars, and nobody can explain the connection between pirates and
Macedonia, a country that doesn't even have access to the sea. The whole
area ended up looking like a deposit of discarded decoration imported
from Las Vegas, and the word most used to describe it is "kitsch".
Fortunately, my apartment was in a much less visually offensive part of
town. Close to Gradski Park (City Park), it's a neighborhood called
Debar Maalo, considered the "bohemian part of town". There's not much
bohemian there though, but it's where you find the best restaurants in
the city.
The two art museums in the city, the National Gallery of Macedonia and
the Museum of Contemporary Art, are very small and mostly uninteresting.
The history museums are a bit better, the Museum of the City of Skopje
showing a few prehistoric artifacts and documents from the big
earthquake of 1963, and the Archaeological Museum of Macedonia showing
artifacts from Paleolithic Period to the times of the Roman Empire. I
also went on a long walk to find the apparently abandoned Skopje
Archeological Site, where you can see the remains of what used to be the
city between the first and fourth centuries. On my way there, I met a
large green snake enjoying the sunlight on a sidewalk.
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