Skopje is one of the most surprising and disconcerting capitals in Europe. In just a few hundred metres you go from an Ottoman maze of alleys, mosques and caravanserais —the Old Bazaar, one of the largest surviving bazaars in the Balkans— to a monumental square bristling with colossal statues, fountains and neoclassical-style buildings raised almost out of nothing in the 2010s. That mix of the genuinely old and the spectacularly new makes Skopje a unique, affordable destination full of contrasts.
The city is also the birthplace of Mother Teresa, born here in 1910, and keeps her memory alive in a memorial house next to the spot where she was baptised. On one side of the Vardar river stands Kale Fortress, looking out over the rooftops; on the other, Macedonia Square with its gigantic 'Warrior on a Horse'. And just outside the city, nature bursts in with Matka Canyon and Mount Vodno, crowned by an enormous cross.
This guide covers Skopje from end to end: how to get in from SKP airport, what to see in the Old Bazaar and in the monumental district of the Skopje 2014 project, how much admission and transport cost in denars, and how to escape to Matka and Vodno. An economic hub, multilingual and in the middle of reinventing itself, Skopje is the perfect gateway to North Macedonia.
Skopje has its roots in ancient Roman Scupi, founded as a colony beside the Vardar and destroyed by an earthquake in 518. Christian and Byzantine in the Middle Ages, it was briefly the capital of the empire of the Serbian tsar Stefan Dušan, who was crowned here in 1346. In 1392 it was conquered by the Ottomans, who turned it into a thriving trading city with its Old Bazaar, mosques, hammams and the Stone Bridge. In 1689 the Austrian general Piccolomini set it on fire during a war against the Ottomans. It passed to Serbia and then to Yugoslavia after the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. On 26 July 1963 a devastating earthquake destroyed much of the city and killed more than a thousand people, shaping its appearance for good. Rebuilt in a modernist style with international help, Skopje became the capital of independent Macedonia in 1991. In the 2010s the 'Skopje 2014' project filled it with statues and monumental buildings, as admired as they are criticised. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The country's political heart: the capital on the Vardar, the Albanian city of Tetovo at the foot of the mountains and the mining town of Kratovo, tucked away in a volcanic crater.
Read the history of Skopje and the north →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 4 activities in Skopie. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it was called Skopje, a city the Romans knew as Scupi stood on the fertile plain beside the river Vardar (the ancient Axios). The area was home to the Dardanians, a people of Illyrian or Thracian stock who ruled these lands in Antiquity, and some authors place an ancient Dardanian capital here. As Rome expanded across the Balkans, Scupi became a strategic outpost on the road linking the Adriatic with Constantinople, and a major military and trading hub.
Under the emperor Domitian, towards the end of the 1st century AD, Scupi was granted the rank of Roman colony (Colonia Flavia Scupinorum), settled largely by legion veterans. It became the most important city in the province of Moesia Superior and, later, of Dardania. It had a forum, a theatre, baths, basilicas and a large necropolis, and their remains are still turning up in excavations northwest of today's Skopje. It was also one of the earliest centres of Christianity in the region, with bishops recorded as early as the 4th century.
Roman Scupi's fate was sealed by the very ground it stood on. In 518 a violent earthquake, one of the great seismic disasters of Late Antiquity and described by Byzantine chroniclers, levelled the city almost entirely. It was the first of the major earthquakes that would shape the history of the place, on a fault line that would strike hard again fourteen centuries later. After the destruction, urban life shifted to the fortified hill where Kale Fortress stands today, which was easier to defend.
Rebuilt on and around Kale hill, the city came to be called Skopje by the Slavs (the Byzantines knew it as Skopia). From the 6th and 7th centuries, waves of Slavic peoples settled across the region, changing its language and its ethnic make-up. Through the Middle Ages, Skopje was contested between the Byzantine Empire and the First Bulgarian Empire, changing hands several times as the Balkan wars of the period ebbed and flowed.
Under the Bulgarian tsar Samuel, around the year 1000, the city played a prominent role before returning to Constantinople's orbit after the victory of the emperor Basil II 'the Bulgar-Slayer'. Skopje then became a Byzantine administrative and church centre, dotted with churches and monasteries. From the 13th century, with the rise of the Kingdom of Serbia, the city passed into the Serbian sphere and became one of its most important centres.
Its medieval high point came with Stefan Dušan, the most powerful of the Serbian rulers. In Skopje, on Easter Sunday 1346, Dušan was crowned 'Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks', making the city the capital of a vast empire that stretched across much of the Balkans. It was partly here that he issued his famous law code (Dušan's Zakonik), one of the great legal monuments of medieval Europe. But Dušan's empire soon crumbled after his death in 1355, leaving the Christian kingdoms of the Balkans fragmented and exposed to a new power advancing from Anatolia: the Ottoman Turks.
In 1392 the Ottomans took Skopje, which was renamed Üsküb and remained part of the Ottoman Empire for almost five centuries. Far from declining, the city went through one of its most prosperous periods under Turkish rule: it became a major centre of trade, crafts and administration in the Balkans, home to Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Sephardic Jews (who arrived after their expulsion from Spain in 1492) and merchants from all over. The monuments that still define the old town today date from that era.
The Ottomans gave Skopje a huge, bustling Old Bazaar (Čaršija), mosques, hammams (Turkish baths), caravanserais (inns for merchants) and bezistens (covered markets). The Stone Bridge over the Vardar, rebuilt in the 15th century, linked the bazaar to the rest of the city and became its symbol. The beautiful Mustafa Pasha Mosque (1492), the Daut Pasha Hamam and the clock tower (Saat Kula) all bear witness to that golden age. Skopje became one of the richest and most populous cities in the Ottoman Balkans.
Decline came brutally in 1689. During the Great Turkish War, Habsburg troops under General Piccolomini occupied the city and, according to the chronicles, set it on fire, officially to halt a cholera epidemic. The blaze destroyed much of Üsküb, and the city took a long time to recover. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, Skopje was a provincial Ottoman centre in a region increasingly stirred up by Balkan nationalisms, until the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 brought the long Ottoman era to an end.
After the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and the First World War, Skopje became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. The city became the capital of the region then known as 'South Serbia' or 'Vardarska'. It was in this multicultural, fast-changing Skopje that Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on 26 August 1910, the daughter of a Catholic family of Albanian origin. The world would come to know her as Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Baptised in the city's Sacred Heart church, she left Skopje as a young woman to devote herself to religious and missionary life. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was canonised in 2016.
During the Second World War, Skopje was occupied by the Axis powers, and its Sephardic Jewish community, one of the oldest in the city, was almost entirely deported and murdered at Treblinka in 1943, one of the most tragic chapters in its history. After the war, Skopje became the capital of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, one of the six republics of Tito's socialist Yugoslavia.
On 26 July 1963, at 5:17 in the morning, a devastating earthquake struck Skopje. In just twenty seconds, the quake, of magnitude around 6.1, destroyed about 80% of the city, killed more than a thousand people and left some 200,000 homeless. The disaster moved the world and sparked an unprecedented wave of international solidarity at the height of the Cold War: aid came from both the Western and the Soviet blocs, and Skopje was declared a 'city of international solidarity'. The rebuilding, guided by a plan from the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, gave the city its modernist concrete look, with landmark buildings such as the railway station and the Central Post Office, now celebrated as brutalist heritage.
When Yugoslavia broke up, Macedonia declared independence in 1991, peacefully and without the war that ravaged other republics, and Skopje became the capital of the new state. The early years were marked by economic hardship, by the dispute with Greece over the country's name, which blocked its entry into NATO and the European Union for decades, and by ethnic tensions with the large Albanian community. These flared into a brief conflict in 2001, settled by the Ohrid Agreement, which expanded minority rights.
In the 2010s, the government launched the ambitious and controversial 'Skopje 2014' project, which completely transformed the city centre. Dozens of monumental statues went up, led by the colossal 'Warrior on a Horse' associated with Alexander the Great, along with fountains, triumphal arches, ornate bridges and buildings with neoclassical and baroque façades, at an estimated cost of more than 500 million euros. The project aimed to give the capital a classical feel and to reinforce a national narrative linked to ancient Macedonia, but it was harshly criticised at home and abroad for its high cost, its questionable taste and its political and historical exploitation, against the backdrop of the identity dispute with Greece.
In 2018-2019, the Prespa Agreement with Greece gave the country its current name, North Macedonia, clearing its path towards Europe: in 2020 it joined NATO. Today Skopje is a young capital in the middle of reinventing itself, where the Ottoman Old Bazaar, the brutalist buildings from the 1960s rebuilding and the gilded statues of Skopje 2014 sit side by side. A city of fault lines and layered identities, it remains a crossroads between East and West, as contradictory as it is fascinating for anyone who visits.
