Where Do I Apply to Become an Old Macedonian Man? 

My time in Bulgaria had come to an end and the bus to Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, was easily found. I settled myself in for the journey, looking forward to a sleep and occasional views of the mountains. However, unfortunately, the first view I was greeted with was something worthy of toe-curling horror. The middle-aged woman across the aisle from me had immediately taken off her shoes and her doting husband/boyfriend/lover/brother/cousin/colleague/neighbour/window cleaner was already engaged the deep tissue massage of said feet. Surely, this was against the unspoken bus code? It must be said that bus misconduct is a particular bug bear of mine. In previous incidents, Panamanian youths had me close to murder or traffic-assisted suicide in Panama, while a year later bright bus lights in Morocco had me wondering if I had accidentally stumbled into a Russian sleep deprivation experiment. Yet, never in my years of glorified global unemployment have I experienced such an affront to human decency in such a setting. No one should be forced to see your naked toes in any setting never mind on a public bus. Soon though, they moved towards the back of the coach, which meant my peripheral vision (but not my mind) was once again unsoiled.  

As we entered Macedonia, the beauty of the country soon distracted me from the worrying lack of an entry passport stamp. Flowers, orchards and lush green gardens ambling down to rock-strewn rivers were common in amongst the villages of northwest Macedonia. In the green mountain valley that we were driving through, tall club-shaped trees dotted the mountainsides, standing over houses like dedicated watchmen. Later, as the terrain transformed from mountains to rolling hills, vast fields of dead sunflowers and bare warehouse buildings seemed to welcome us into Skopje, the strange capital of Macedonia. 

The bus station was a dark, dingy, concrete monstrosity, sheltering under the giant slab of a train station that sat above. I slung my big bag onto my back and my little one onto my front and set off to the hostel which wasn’t far away. Off the main road, I headed down a couple of small backstreets whose houses were a hodgepodge of materials and styles.

People

Almost as soon as I arrived in Skopje, I got chatting with other hostel dwellers. These people would come to define my experience in this city, making it one of the most memorable places that I’ve ever travelled to. Their names were (and probably still are) Charles and Elle. Charles was a 30-something English guy and Elle was a couple of years younger than me and Northern Irish. My first lunch in the city, just after arriving was spent with Charles. I quickly found him to be thoughtful, chatty and inquisitive. He was obviously very intelligent but very modest, a fun yet chilled person to hang out with. Just after lunch we got chatting to Elle who was deeply unaware of her occasional and unexplained slip into an American accent. She was full of enthusiasm, very open-minded to the views and stances of other people and seemed a happy soul chasing the best things in life. For me our three personalities seemed to complement each other perfectly. For them, I’m sure they tried everything to steer clear of that strange, tall and bearded hermit-looking fella, but to no avail.

New Skopje

Skopje’s city centre is pretty tiny and straddles the Vardar River. Leaving the hostel, ducking under untamed fig trees and shimmying through makeshift car parking areas, we got to the river and walked at a height beside it. Like most major cities on a river, the natural destructive and constructive will of the river had been subdued by concrete walls and defences. I see this as a fair development for us humans. After all, we understand a river can facilitate trade and but also facilitate your living room becoming a swirling pool of municipal sewage if left wild and unchecked. However, unlike in Budapest or Phnom Penh, there was a much closer relationship with the Vardar River in Skopje. Despite its heavily polluted waters, people fish there every day, from the banks and from in the water. The abundance of fishermen was a sight that didn’t seem to fit in with my idea of what the centre of a capital city should be like; a feeling I would continue to have in Skopje. Continuing our walk into the centre, a handful of wooden book kiosks stood proudly displaying their tomes in wildly disorganised piles. But, in the distance and beyond the next bridge was perhaps the strangest section of Skopje.  

Not one, not two, but three lumbering pirate ships sit on concrete stilts above the river. One of the disproportioned boats has a restaurant and hotel, the other two are abandoned. Strange bulbous ghost ships that never touched the water. Then there are the statues, hundreds and hundreds of them. They are everywhere you look: the roads, bridges, rooftops and squares, and they are laughably, embarrassingly terrible. Most have not aged gracefully, you know with that gentle tinge of green. Instead, they are either melting due to the rain-borne corrosion, or far worse, they’re woefully uninspired. I get it, I mean it’s 2012 you’ve been tasked to redesign the city to attract tourists and the government says, “Stick to the classics, don’t deviate from the tried and tested sales strategy. Say it with me now, ‘Sex… I mean… Statues sell’”. You’re tasked with pumping out statues of people that may or may not have existed, slapping wildly inaccurate plaques on them and moving on. Can you really be blamed for putting the square root of 0 effort into adorning the statues with an inkling of humanity, detail or craftsmanship? No, no you cannot. That then is why they look as if they’ve been given vague NPC design directions like “broad chested man wearing a suit” and then been carelessly cast from scrap metal.

Leering over these statues were the odd waterfront façades of clearly out of place architecture. A flimsy fake neoclassical façade replete with hollow columns and domes hid Skopje’s tallest glass building and a weird thin French looking building seemed to be nothing but a windbreak for the ugly communist building lurking behind it.  

On the other side of the river from the fake columns was a wide pedestrian pavement with trees and a line of bars which were rammed every night. This led past the statues, the fishermen and two of the pirate ships to Skopje’s big square. Macedonia square is the centre of the city and is just as odd as the riverfront. Standing pride and place in the middle of the square is an 8 million euro, naively symbolic middle finger to Greece. A statue of Alexander the Great, the most extraordinary military mind the world has ever seen, on a horse, which is on a big column. So, what’s the problem? Well, Alexander the Great was king of the ancient kingdom of Macedon. This kingdom lay on the northern periphery of Archaic and Classical Greece (i.e. modern Macedonia plus extras) but would come to be the dominant state of Hellenistic Greece as Alexander took Greek culture around the world. So, you’d think that Macedonia has the right to keep the history of the King of Macedon all for themselves. However, Alexander was actually born in what is modern day Greece. He shaped what it is to be Greek and brought about a Greek renaissance. So, Greece claimed the statue was provocative and that the Macedonians were stealing their culture. But in my eyes the Greeks haven’t got a leg to stand on because the Macedonian government in all their wisdom (many facets of which we have seen so far) elected to call their crowning figurehead of Skopje’s revival, their monument to the glories of their ancestors, “Warrior on a horse”. Which warrior? We’ll never know.  

Old Skopje

From the warrior’s square you can return to the river and cross the Stone Bridge. Built in the mid 14^th century by Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror, it has become the symbol of Skopje. Throughout the centuries parts have had to be rebuilt or restored, thanks to Macedonia’s proclivity to hosting earthquakes. The most devastating of which was in 1963 when a magnitude 6.1 earthquake (the same magnitude as the one I experienced in Taiwan) destroyed 80% of the city’s infrastructure. As you cross the bridge you are greeted with more statues, the most striking of which is a large man with his fist raised triumphantly, facing towards Alexander… I mean… the warrior on a horse. Some might say this equally expensive bronze statue depicts Alexander’s father, King Phillip II of Macedon, however the Macedonian government resents your assumptions and has called it “Warrior with accompanying elements”.  

Past the statues you enter my favourite part of the city, the Old Bazaar. This is a large part of Skopje and is one of the biggest and oldest marketplaces in the Balkans. It has been Skopje’s centre of trade and commerce since the 12^th century and is a cultural, religious and historical look into the Ottoman influence over the country. While the first couple of streets and squares are lined with tourist tat and thumping bars, you can immerse yourself in the strangely serene streets of the bazaar with no effort. On both the main commercial streets and the uneven back streets there was always something to see, so I just wandered down any road that took my fancy. The buzz of life in that place was not the excitable hum of modern Skopje, but a constant sensory reconnection to the past. The whisper of memory from the ancient architecture that had sheltered so many generations, the uneven stone streets polished by the millions who had set foot on them and the constant feeling of a presence of mind. No one was sat on their phone; young men strode from place to place or manned the many shops while the older men ambled in the shade of the low-slung fabric verandas or lowered themselves down onto stools to watch the unfolding scenes. I felt like I was back in Jeddah’s old town.  

During my wanders I had only one firm destination in mind, the Mustafa Pasha Mosque. The mosque seemed to watch over the city from above and I was keen to go inside. Once I had made it up there, and had a little wander inside the impressive edifice, I decided to sit in the lush gardens that surrounded the mosque. The birds were singing unknown melodies and the sunlight was a pleasant warming glow on my face. On a bench to my left, was an old man in a blue check shirt. He was doing much the same as me, enjoying the sun and the view of the 500-year-old mosque but had also come with a cup of coffee. He was chatting to the gardener/caretaker of the mosque, who had dragged his leaf blower into the shade of a large tree to fix it. After a while the old man came to try and speak to me, when I didn’t understand what he was saying he said “Turkish?” and I said no, this enquiry was quickly followed by, “Arab?”. At this point there was little point in trying to explain that I’m actually English, in my experience that only tends to confuse things. So, I nodded. He tried to speak Turkish to me, and I tried replying in Arabic, the two languages were much closer than Macedonian and English, so I think we were closer to a common understanding. After a short and taxing attempt at conversation he returned to his coffee, and I got up. But before I left and sank back into the street life of the Bazaar, I asked the man if I could take his picture. Something I almost never do, but he was someone I didn’t want to forget. He said yes and much like the tribesmen of Saudi Arabia he didn’t smile but looked intensely at the camera.  

Back down in the Bazaar and with newfound confidence in myself I continued exploring, nipping into more mosques and heading towards the Bit Pazar. One mosque just outside of the main section of the Old Bazaar was sadly closed but on arrival I found three old men, sat on a bench just chilling. Presumably old friends, they were all sat differently, and each had a different demeanour. I couldn’t resist taking a photo with their permission.  

The Bit Pazar is the area of the Old Bazaar that you would be most at home calling a market. Around the edges of this dense crush of stalls are the people selling tools, cheap plastic toys and any odds and ends you might want. However, at its centre is the main market. It was an enormous, covered produce market selling just about anything you could ever want to consume. It instantly reminded me of the Green Bazaar in Almaty, which was a good thing, lots to explore. On my first trip there, I walked around taking photos and soaking up the atmosphere, the frantic exchange of money and goods, the careful arranging of produce and the squeeze of people. Some sellers looked around eagerly trying to catch the eye of a would-be-buyer, while others leant on boxes, busied themselves with chatter or had their feet up. I loved it in there and on my return with Charles and Elle, we decided to buy some dates to eat in a secret place Charles and I had found beforehand.  

Food & Drink

The Secret Square

The secret place was only, it seems, a secret among the tourists idling around the Old Bazaar. Down an old set of stairs, half obscured by a tree, was a small square and Turkish teahouse. Down there, the gentle fluttering of playing cards and the muffled slam of dominoes onto floral tablecloths disturbed the otherwise quiet scene. Each passionate drop of a domino moved the heavy air, distorting the languid tendrils of cigarette smoke that would’ve otherwise happily hung limply above their makers. Those men who were deep into the game had eyes that never deviated from their hand, a movement to tap their cigarette on the ashtray was almost muscle memory. Whereas, those who hung at the peripheries, watching the game unfold, leaned, peered and smirked as they saw the tension building.

Armed with dates from the market, Charles, Elle and I settled into our plastic chairs to enjoy our surroundings, as well as have a good natter. When we went inside to pay, two men were there chatting away. The one facing away from me wore a dark beret-type hat and flies seemed to be congregating on his back for a reason unknown to all but the flies. In front of him, across the small round table was another man, slightly younger, or maybe just slightly less hunched, with a white shirt and a deeply lined face. They were sat there in quiet conversation, no cards, dominoes or distractions. At that time of the day, the softest light was washing though the window and it served as the only illumination on the scene, the rest of the café was empty, dark and silent. As their sedate conversation continued, I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The light in particular was almost smoky and strained, it had lost its usual eagerness for definition and contrast. Even the words exchanged between the two men seemed to be lost in the haze. That sense of the unfinished and ill-defined, the incomplete narrative before me created an almost illusory rendering of the two men. I like to think of that scene existing outside of time. Those flies have congregated, will congregate and continue to congregate on that faceless man’s back. The two of them will talk there forever, content in each other’s company and illuminated by the light, while the rest of the teahouse fades to darkness in its furthest recesses.  

Turkish Food

Our favourite place to go for food in the Old Bazaar area of Skopje was Medo. A small Turkish restaurant beyond the lazy outer limit of most tourists, it served a small menu of simple Turkish dishes. A small menu means good food, so we tried it all. Gözleme, Menemen and Pide were our favourites and we even bought a Turkish knafeh for dessert (for details on this strange but essential dessert look no further than my food and drink post from Jordan). The homemade bread was amazing, cooked by the hijab wearing Turkish women in the kitchen, and the waitresses were very friendly. We were quite happy on our little table on the street but then Elle let out a little “eeek”. The grey and white cat we had seen wandering about had found Elle, the biggest cat lover in all of Skopje, and taken up residence on her lap. We named the cat Melon, it stayed with us for the rest of the evening as we continued ordering tea and chatting. Soon the weather turned, and the rain started as the restaurant was close to closing. The ladies started bringing in tables and chairs, so Charles and I got up to help. The chefs and waitresses were astonished by us choosing to help them and through their thankful smiles they tried chatting to us. Out of the blue, having only spoken some basic English to each other, one of the chefs asked if I’m Jordanian. Maybe it was my pronunciation of knafeh or something that triggered the question, but I was shocked to have been linked to my second home by a stranger. 

In stark contrast to Medo, we had been so lazy and hungry on our first night in the city so had settled for a restaurant in a tourist-filled square. We should’ve known better. The meat was bland and verging on undercooked but that isn’t why I remember the place. Our waiter was the most antisocial discontented misery ever to wait tables. He sighed and grumbled, slumped and stomped. However, most worryingly of all, after greeting him with some equivalent of “Hi, how’s things?” he openly complained to us about having customers, “Urrghhhh all these people (he said “people” said with utter contempt) are always asking me for things”. No no, good sir, that’s not how it works. If someone asks you how you’re doing, you have a few options:  

1. If you’re feeling good about life, say, ‘Good thanks’. 
2. If you’re feeling somwhere in the middle then you can say, ‘Yeah, not bad thanks’  
3. If you’re harbouring a pervasive feeling of disenchantment with the human experience then, now this might sound counterproductive but, LIE! You’re talking to a total stranger, and they don’t need to hear about your problems. They’ve got their own to worry about. 

That’s just how society works, suppress don’t express. Stay psychologically unhealthy, folks!  

Final Thoughts

Countless laughable statues, bizarre false facades, bars with live music, Ottoman architecture, patient fishermen, cute stray cats, three pirate ships, characterful old men and thankful Turkish women, they all stick in my mind from my time in Skopje. But without Charles and Elle, with whom I shared all the laughs, sights, sounds and tastes of this strange place, the city would lose its lustre. While some occasions can warrant a happy solitude, being around people that understand you, feed off your energy and are quite happy laughing uncontrollably at large, terribly made statues with you, those are the people that can elevate an experience. And so, after Charles and Elle had gone onwards to Ohrid, and I had got back to the hostel after an afternoon of walking around with a new arrival called Joey, I decided to relax. I was sat outside, headphones in and listening to Gregory Alan Isakov (chilled music that all sounds vaguely the same). A guy who had been at the hostel for a week, had been eyeing me quietly and soon sidled over and said in a jokey tone, “Awwww, are you missing your friends?” but the fact of the matter was that, right then and there the answer was yes, I was.