The Old Bazaar: the back story

About The Old Bazaar: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Skopje Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Cross the Stone Bridge and the city changes. The Old Bazaar, the čaršija, is a maze of low shops and workshops, domes and minarets, inns and courtyards, where people have traded for centuries.

The market of the Balkans

A market grew here in Byzantine times, but it was the Ottomans, from 1392, who made it great. Merchants and caravans came from all over the empire, and the bazaar spread over the slope below the fortress, with each street given to a trade.

Hans and hammams

Travellers and their animals stayed in caravanserais, or hans: Kapan An, Suli An and Kuršumli An survive. The Daut Pasha and Čifte hammams, now galleries, were the public baths, and the Bezisten was the covered market for precious goods.

The čaršija has been Skopje’s marketplace for more than five hundred years.

Faiths side by side

The Mustafa Pasha Mosque and the Sultan Murat Mosque stand a few minutes from the Church of the Holy Saviour, half sunk below street level, with one of the finest carved wooden iconostases in the Balkans.

The craftsmen

The bazaar is still a place of trades: goldsmiths and silver filigree workers, tailors, cobblers, tinsmiths and the sweet makers of baklava and tulumbi. Kujundžiska, the goldsmiths’ street, is full of jewellery shops.

The bazaar today

Today the čaršija mixes workshops with cafés, kebapi grills, galleries and bars. It is lively in the evenings and calm in the early morning.

Our advice: come in the morning to watch the craftsmen at work, have lunch at a kebapi grill, look into the courtyards of the hans and the Church of the Holy Saviour, and return in the evening for a drink. Finish at Bit Pazar, the busy market at the top of the bazaar.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with The Old Bazaar: the back story before you go.