Skopje Audio Tours

Skopje was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake on July 26, 1963, an event that killed over 1,000 people and left 200,000 homeless. The rebuilt city that emerged over the following decades was largely designed with international assistance, including a master plan by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, giving it a mix of brutalist concrete and pedestrian-friendly planning that still characterizes the central district. Then, after independence in 1991, the government launched an ambitious and controversial project called Skopje 2014, filling the city centre with neoclassical statues, triumphal arches, and bronze fountains.

The result is a city centre that is genuinely unlike anything else in Europe, simultaneously earnest and over-the-top.

The enormous equestrian statue of Alexander the Great, officially labeled Warrior on a Horse to avoid diplomatic conflict with Greece, occupies the central bridge with several companion statues and fountains. The old Carsija bazaar, the Ottoman market district that survived the earthquake and predates the rest of the visible city by five centuries, is a genuinely ancient quarter of mosques, caravanserais, and craftsmen's workshops that provides an entirely different layer. Skopje holds contradictions with an energy that makes it more interesting than it might initially appear.