SKOPJE: If you're travelling to Macedonia for the European Championships qualifier, why not take the opportunity to stay on to celebrate a football victory – or, heavens forbid, nurse the pain of defeat, writes
GAVIN CORBETT
VIEWED FROM a certain perspective – the ramparts of the Kale fortress high above the city, for instance – the Macedonian capital Skopje is at once a thrillingly “foreign” yet strangely familiar place.
It's that stock exotic setting straight out of the Tintincomics, Ruritania made real, the archetypal "east meets west" city, with a European quarter on one side of the river and an Islamic quarter on the other, all enclosed by a ring of dark mountains. Even the national flag of Macedonia – a yellow sunburst on a red background – looks decidedly oriental.
Hundreds of Irish soccer fans will travel here for the European Championships qualifier on June 4th, and if you’re one of those fans and staying on for a few days is an option, then you should do so, for there’s so much more to Skopje than a football stadium.
Macedonia is historically not a happy hunting ground for the Irish soccer team. An infamous 3-2 defeat here in 1997, and a 1-1 draw that bumped us into an ill-fated play-off for the 2000 European Championships, will have footie fans approaching Skopje with trepidation, but there’s no reason any of them should leave it with anything other than pleasant memories.
GETTING TO know the city is easy because not only is it small (home to about 650,000 people), but it’s a friendly place. Having arrived here from battered and demonised Belgrade – where, for all its downbeat charms, a certain guarded spirit prevails – I found Skopje always keen to show its best side.
Life here is lived in the open, in cafes in the shadow of minarets and on bar terraces under shimmering electronic screens, and a cultural festival always seems to be either taking place or in the offing. Imagine the buzz of Galway allied to a long-suppressed national identity and you’re some way to understanding how the city ticks.
Ul Makedonija, in the heart of the new town, is as good a place as any to start your exploration of Skopje. Thronged with bars, cafes and shops, it’s not much different in character to any other high street in Europe, but being the heart of social and commercial life in the city it’s probably the most representative street in modern Skopje.
It does encapsulate, however, in two addresses on and just off the street, what this city is best known for to the outside world. At its southern end squats an odd-looking building: from a distance, it looks like a train station frozen in time somewhere around the early 1960s, which is exactly what it is.
Now the City Museum, this used to be Skopje’s rail terminus. The hands of its clock are paused on 5.17am – the time, on the morning of July 27th, 1963, a devastating earthquake struck the city, destroying 80 per cent of its buildings and causing much of it to be rebuilt in the style you see today.
Post-quake Skopje could easily have ended up as a drab place; I view it as spacious, leafy and sociable, its planes of clean concrete glowing gorgeously orange come the evening.
About halfway down Ul Makedonija you’ll find a shrine to Macedonia’s most famous daughter. Mother Teresa Memorial House, a dinky little building of stone and glass blocks which opened only last year, lies close to the birthplace of the humanitarian nun. Inside is a chapel and a museum, which tells the story of Mother Teresa’s life and includes some of her relics, while outside a slightly spooky-looking statue surveys the scene.
Ul Makedonija leads to the huge plaza of Plostad Makedonija, which itself gives way to the Vardar river on its northern side. Off the plaza’s northeast corner, behind the Gradski Trgovski shopping centre, take your pick of a string of lovely cafes on the riverbank – a perfect place to sip a cappuccino while observing the construction boom going on downstream.
Everywhere you look there seem to be building cranes. Directly across the Vardar from the riverside cafes, for instance, a neoclassical edifice is fast taking shape, which will soon house a National Archaeological Museum. All this is evidence of the Skopje 2014 programme, an initiative to fit the city out with more buildings, monuments and statuary – basically to bring it up to the mark of what the Macedonian government thinks a capital city should be.
You can’t fault the desire of this young nation, for so long a regional outpost of Yugoslavia, to express itself in stone and concrete, but the programme has drawn criticism for what many say is a lopsided take on Macedonian identity – too much European pomp and not enough flavour of the east is the tenor of the argument.
FOR AN AUTHENTIC sample of that flavour, head over the 15th century Kamen bridge to the Carsija, or Turkish quarter, a living legacy of the region’s Ottoman past and today home to the conquerors’ descendants and much of the city’s Muslim Albanian population. A warren of cobbled lanes lined with craftmen’s shops, it’s a less convoluted version of the classic medina of north African cities, and you’d be happy to get lost in it for hours.
The quintessential Carsija experience is to grab a table at a corner coffee house and observe daily life unfold around you as the wails of the muezzins waft out of the mosques. Just 120 denar, or a little less than €2, bought me a good coffee and a generous plate of the finest baklava I’ve ever tasted at the Mado Prom cafe, on the corner of Podragje and Jorgandziska, although the bliss of those moments was amusingly and loudly broken by the sound of the muezzin in the Murat Pasha mosque suddenly overcome with a fit of coughing – it was as if Beavis and Butthead had gatecrashed the call to prayer.
Gold, silver and textiles are the chief commodities on sale in the Carsija. Unfortunately, there also appears to be a trade for animal furs here. Several shops I passed had the skins of foxes, minks and other mammals on display. It put me in mind of an exchange I’d had with an American couple back in my hotel, who’d told me they were visiting Macedonia “for the hunting”.
A more diverse range of goods can be found on the Carsija's northern edge at the appropriately named Bit Bazaar, a vast tented market that could be anywhere in the Muslim world from Marrakech to Muscat. It's as much a meeting place as somewhere to buy wedges of watermelon, trowel-fulls of cumin or pirated DVD copies of The Fast and the Furious 5, and you really feel you're getting under the skin of local life as you peruse its stalls.
It’s not all commerce in the Carsija though – a couple of Turkish baths converted to art galleries, the City Art Gallery and the Cifte Amam offer some hush from the hubbub outside.
At some stage on your visit to Skopje, it might be nice to get a physical overview of the city. Mount Vodno, to the south, is 150 denar (€2.50) in a taxi away from town. Twenty-five metres taller than Carrauntoohil, it barely registers as a hillock in these parts but offers stunning vistas all around.
On the other side of the city, and back in the Carsija, the Ottoman Kale fortress is free to enter and fun to explore. The battlements walkway is perhaps not the best place to venture while in a merry post-match state, but definitely a good spot to blow away a hangover.
Skopje is an ancient city rediscovering and reinventing itself. It might not be on many people’s radars as a citybreak hotspot, but with the nip and tuck that’s well under way and the riches it already has, it deserves to be, and soon.
And as somewhere to celebrate a football victory – or, heavens forbid, nurse the pain of defeat – I don’t know of many better, friendlier locations.
Getting there
If you’re travelling for the match, it’s likely you’ll be on a charter flight from Dublin. Otherwise,fly from Dublin with Adria Airways (adria.si), or from London Heathrow with Macedonian Airlines (alternativeairlines.com).
Skopje where to . . .
3 places to stay
Value:Art Hostel, Ante Hadzimitkov 5, 00-389-70-233336, art-hostel.com.mk. Located east of the city centre, this offers double rooms for about €40. The outdoor balcony with couches is a nice touch. It might be good to stay here as part of a Balkans backpack jaunt as it's a member of balkan-hostels.biz.ly, which offers 5 per cent off if coming from another Balkans hostel.
Mid-market:Hotel TCC Plaza, Vasil Glavinov 12, 00-389-2-3111-1807, tccplaza.com. Doesn't look promising from the outside, housed as it is in an office building, and it'll never win prizes for interior design, but the TCC Plaza is clean and well-serviced. The staff are extremely helpful, and its location just behind Ul Makedonija makes it a winner. Doubles from €115.
Upmarket:Hotel Stone Bridge, Kej Dimitar Vlahov 1, 00-389-2-324-4900, stonebridge-hotel.com. As its name suggests, this is located just metres from the picturesque Kamen bridge, on the Carsija side of town, and it certainly takes its interiors cue from the surrounding streets: Ottoman furnishings and an air of the golden age of travel make it the classiest hotel in Skopje. It's also where the Macedonian football team stay for home games. Doubles from €159.
3 places to eat
Value:Destan, Partizanski Odredi, 00-389-2-322-4063. Consider yourself a kebab connoisseur? You have to try this place, the jewel of the Carsija's kebapcilnici. Don't expect your standard post-pub irradiated meat shavings, only kebabs as the Ottomans intended. The seasoned bread and yoghurt is terrific.
Mid-market:Dal Met Fu, Plostad Makedonija, 00-389-2-323-9584. Classic Macedonian meat-and-veg combos and the usual Italian suspects. Doesn't sound like much? If you want to experience life as it's lived in Skopje's new town today, prop yourself up by a window seat, watch life go by, and listen to the chatter of families, politicians and Eastern Orthodox clergymen all around you.
Upmarket:Pivnica An, Kapan An 1472, 00-389-2-321-2111. Housed in a 15th century Ottoman inn, the atmosphere here is very special, and so is the traditional Macedonian/Turkish cuisine. The moussaka and stuffed vine leaves are excellent, and the wine list features local produce.
Shop spot
Behind the twisting complex of the Gradski Trgovski shopping centre, in a hole in a wall that may once have been a garage or a bomb shelter, is a shop with no name – a veritable Aladdin’s cave of junk and curios the like of which I’ve never seen before. Ottoman swords, 19th century toys and Soviet cameras are piled high inside this time capsule of Macedonian history. Good luck getting that Nazi code machine through customs, though.
Night spot
Oh, go on so . . . you’re here for the football, so why not head to the St Patrick pub, Kej 13 November, 00-389-2-322-0431. Skopje’s first Irish pub holds no surprises, but the wooden “Victorian” interior isn’t the most offensive, and it attracts a cheerful crowd.