Balkan backpack

Weird and wonderful, never been anywhere quite like Skopje. We stayed in the old bazaar area, still empty on a Sunday morning (maybe due to protests at government forcing increased wages, hard to understand the cafe owner's explanation). Old caravan inns and hamams converted into restaurants and galleries, mosques, a sunken church (had to be lower than the mosques during Ottoman rule), a ruined fort above the old town and looking over the bowl of mountains, narrow river, more and bigger flags than ever before hinting at insecurity in national identity, the nation does protest too much in the face of powerful neighbours and its own cultural soup...and on both river banks, an explosion of modern municipal buildings and disproportionately large neo Classical statues. Already weather-worn and peeling, surrounded by broken or unfinished buildings, weeds and rubbish, it's like a Macedonian history-themed Disneyland left unkempt or cared for for a decade or so. Philip of Macedon hails his elevated son (and murderer?) across intermittent fountains, a temple, a triumphal arch leading to a car park littered with glass shards and graffitied mega statues of Cyril and Methodius, the saints who brought Christianity and their alphabet to the region...all this, plus a modernist chapel-museum commemorating the spot where Mother Theresa grew up and a national dish of baked beans better by far than any Heinz...it will long stay with me...Read more