Skopje: history and heritage

About Skopje: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Skopje Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Skopje is a city of two banks. North of the Vardar lie the Kale fortress and the Old Bazaar, one of the largest Ottoman market quarters in the Balkans; south lies the modern centre, rebuilt after the earthquake of 1963 with help from around the world. The fifteenth-century Stone Bridge joins them, as it has for more than five hundred years.

At a glance

Names through history: Scupi (Roman), Skopje, Üsküp (Ottoman Turkish), Shkup (Albanian).

Peoples: Macedonians, Albanians, Turks, Roma, Bosniaks, Serbs and Aromanians.

When the earthquake struck at 5:17 one July morning, nations on both sides of the Cold War came to rebuild Skopje.

Shaped by: Rome, Byzantium, the Bulgarian and Serbian medieval states, the Ottoman Empire (1392–1912), Yugoslavia and, since 1991, independent North Macedonia.

Geography: the Vardar valley below Mount Vodno, on the road from the Danube to the Aegean.

Skopje today

The City of Skopje counted 526,502 people in the 2021 census, according to the State Statistical Office of North Macedonia: more than a quarter of the country’s population. Macedonians are the largest group, and the city is also home to large Albanian, Roma, Turkish, Bosniak, Serbian and Aromanian (Vlach) communities. Šuto Orizari, on the northern edge, is one of the few municipalities in Europe with a Roma majority.

Scupi

The Romans founded Scupi, a colony for veterans, on a terrace above the Vardar in the first century AD. An earthquake destroyed it in 518, and the city moved to the Kale hill. The ruins of Scupi, with its theatre and basilica, lie on the north-western edge of the city, and the Byzantine walls of Kale still crown the hill above the bazaar.

A royal city

In the Middle Ages Skopje passed between Byzantium, the Bulgarian Empire and medieval Serbia. In 1346 the Serbian king Stefan Dušan was crowned emperor here. The frescoes of St Panteleimon at Gorno Nerezi, painted in 1164 on the slopes of Vodno, are among the masterpieces of Byzantine art, admired for their tender, human faces.

Five Ottoman centuries

The Ottomans took Skopje in 1392 and held it until 1912. The Old Bazaar grew into a city of craftsmen’s streets, mosques, hammams and caravanserais: the Mustafa Pasha Mosque (1492), the Daut Pasha Hamam, now part of the National Gallery, and the Kuršumli An and Suli An, where merchants once stabled their horses. In 1689 a fire set during a Habsburg campaign destroyed much of the city. The Church of the Holy Saviour, built half below ground in the Ottoman years, keeps a carved walnut iconostasis of the early nineteenth century.

Mother Teresa’s city

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the future Mother Teresa, was born in Skopje in 1910 to an Albanian Catholic family. The Memorial House of Mother Teresa stands on the site of the church where she was baptised.

The earthquake of 1963

At 5:17 on the morning of 26 July 1963 an earthquake destroyed most of the city. More than eighty countries sent help, and the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange won the competition for the master plan of the new centre. His Central Post Office, the Transport Centre and the “City Wall” of housing blocks belong to that bold modernist rebuilding. The old railway station, its clock stopped at 5:17, now houses the City Museum.

Arts and institutions

The Museum of Contemporary Art, on the hill above Kale, was built after the earthquake and filled with works donated by artists from around the world, including Picasso. The Macedonian Opera and Ballet, the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University and the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts are all in the city. In the 2010s a wave of new statues, bridges and classical façades changed the riverbank again, and Skopje now wears all its eras at once.

Our advice: cross the Stone Bridge into the Old Bazaar in the morning, drink Turkish coffee in a han courtyard and climb to Kale. In the afternoon, take the cable car up Vodno to the Millennium Cross, and stop at St Panteleimon on the way down.

Sources

Population: State Statistical Office of the Republic of North Macedonia, Census of Population, Households and Dwellings 2021. History: Museum of the City of Skopje; National Gallery of North Macedonia; Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Skopje”.

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