Scopin' Out Skopje

Thursday, June 21, 2018
Skopje, Skopje, Macedonia
Happy Summer Solstice! Today we celebrated the longest day of the year by getting up at the same time the sun rose in London- 4:45am (OMFG I love summer), and caught an early flight to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia.
Why Macedonia? Well, we loved Montenegro and Albania, and we'd heard that this former Yugoslavian state was just as amazing. And also, I was on the hunt for country #70, and WizzAir was having a sale.  See? It all works out!
We walked to our guesthouse in the 85F heat, and were very excited to note that our guesthouse was not just cute and sparkly clean, but our large, airy room overlooked a pool! Given that this guesthouse was so inexpensive for how lovely it was, and the fact that I saw coffeehouses selling lattes for the equivalent of 50 cents, I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it here.
We headed off to see  Skopje's Old Town.  Honestly, I wasn't expecting much from Skopje; I had been told to spend no time here, because it's overrun with casinos and Russian tourists. I was expecting a post-Soviet concrete city of dullness, much like Bucharest (sorry, Romania).  So I was quite surprised to enter Skopje's Old Town and be immediately awed.
Skopje's Old Town does its best to impress, no question about it. The Old Town is filled- and I mean FILLED, they are EVERYWHERE- with ginormous statues and ornate 18th and 19th century classical French architecture. (The centerpiece statue of Alexander the Great is a ridiculous 75 feet high.)  Standing in the center of the square, I could have been in Place de Comedie in Montpellier, France. We were uber-impressed with the gorgeous bridges, buildings, and statues; one of the Old Town's bridges, The Stone Bridge, dated from the 13th century. We marvelled at the history of this town, until we read a plaque that essentially said that everything except for the Stone Bridge was built after 2014.
Womp-womp.
We did a little googling and discovered that Macedonia, whose citizens earn an average of $4,000 a year, went on a spending spree of nearly 40 million euros for the "Skopje 2014" project. They commissioned millions of euros' worth of marble and bronze statues from Italy, and built entirely new structures in a style that, knowing its lack of true historical context, felt like Caesar's Palace and Versailles had a weird baby. Don't get me wrong; it's quite lovely, and overall I liked it. But I'm also going to say the entire scene is problematic on many levels. 
We realized that Skopje essentially has two Old Towns: This new cash-injected version, and across the Vardar River, the OTHER Old Town. The newer version is the Christian side, but the Turkish side is a truly authentic Old Town, with winding cobblestone streets, a bazaar, and a fortress.  
Skopje Fortress overlooks the entire city from a hilltop, and dates from 200BC. "On a hilltop" meant we had to climb a hill, then shit tons of stairs in the heat to reach it; while the views were impressive, the fortress is not much beyond a ramparts surrounding an excavation site. So after this tiring, sweaty hike, we settled into a cafe in the town square and discovered rakija, Macedonia's extremely strong local spirits. And then we absolutely needed a nap.
Much later in the evening, we wandered back to Old Town for dinner. A street music festival was ongoing, and crowds thronged the beautifully lit up square. We settled into a cafe and watched Argentina destroy its World Cup standing, and discovered Macedonia's extremely good, and shockingly cheap, wine. How cheap? A liter in a restaurant costs the equivalent of $5. I'm not saying we ordered an entire liter to amortize this bargain. But I'm also not saying we didn't. 
Tomorrow we head to "the jewel of Macedonia," Lake Ohrid.

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