Four days in Skopje: a city rebuilt twice, and still arguing about what it is

Walk into the main square and take a moment with it, because there is a lot going on. Before 1963 this was a square of neoclassical buildings; the earthquake took nearly all of them; the rebuilding put concrete in their place; and the 2010s put the neoclassicism back as facades over the concrete, along with fountains, columns and an enormous bronze warrior on a horse in the middle, officially called Warrior on a Horse and unofficially called Alexander the Great, for reasons involving a long dispute with Greece that was settled in 2018 by changing the country's name.

Whatever you conclude about it, this is where the city meets, and by nine in the evening it is full of people walking in circles and eating ice cream.

North of the square the Stone Bridge crosses the Vardar. It has stood in some form since at least the fifteenth century, is over two hundred metres long on a dozen stone arches, and survived the earthquake when almost nothing else did. Cross it slowly: the bazaar and the fortress are ahead of you, the ministries behind, and that is the whole argument of this city in one walk.

Come back over and walk east along the river to the triumphal arch of 2011, which has an observation deck and marble reliefs of Macedonian history around the outside. Then dinner in Debar Maalo, which is where people actually eat.

Cross the bridge early and go up into the bazaar. It has been the commercial quarter since at least the twelfth century, it is the largest surviving Ottoman bazaar in the Balkans outside Istanbul, and it is not a museum: coppersmiths, tailors, gold shops, tea houses, a fish market, and men playing backgammon in doorways. The earthquake damaged it and it was rebuilt as it was.

Start at the lead inn, the grandest of the three surviving caravanserais, built in 1550 around a double gallery of arches where merchants stabled animals below and slept above. It is now a museum and a courtyard, and it is the most beautiful space in Skopje.

Above the bazaar on a plateau stands the mosque of 1492, built by a vizier of Sultan Selim, elegant, intact and never altered, with a garden of tombs and a good view down over the roofs. Take your shoes off, cover up, and go in.

Then the fortress. Kale sits on the highest ground in the valley, its oldest walls built of great squared blocks, and it is free to walk around: grass, ramparts, a couple of excavated towers, and the entire city laid out below with Vodno behind it. Go up in the last hours of the afternoon.

Eat in the bazaar. Grilled meat, salad, bread, tea afterwards, and it will cost you the price of a coffee at home.

Skopje's real advantage over other capitals in this region is that you can be somewhere spectacular twenty minutes after leaving your hotel.

Go west first. Matka is a gorge on the Treska river, dammed in the 1930s so that the water sits deep and green between limestone walls, with a footpath cut along one side and a fourteenth century monastery at the entrance. Hire a kayak, or take a boat up to the mouth of the cave at the far end, which is one of the deepest underwater cave systems anybody has found in Europe and is still being surveyed. Half a day, and take a swimming costume.

In the afternoon go the other way, to the mountain that stands over the city. A cable car climbs the last stretch of Vodno in a few minutes to a summit a little above the thousand metre mark, and the walk up from the middle station takes ninety minutes through oak woods if you would rather earn it.

On the top is a steel cross 66 metres high, put up in 2002 for two thousand years of Christianity, lit at night and visible from every street in the city. There is a lift inside it and a cafe next to it, and the view runs from the Skopje valley to the mountains on the Kosovan border. Stay for the light going down, then come back for a long dinner.

Three short stops on the south bank, all within ten minutes of one another.

Start at the old railway station, or what is left of it. The building was cut in half by the earthquake in 1963 and the ruined section was deliberately kept, with the clock on the front left showing five seventeen in the morning, the minute it stopped. Inside the surviving wing is the city museum, which covers the disaster and the rebuilding that followed, when architects and money arrived from both sides of the cold war at once.

Then the memorial house to Mother Teresa, who was born in Skopje in 1910 and lived here until she was eighteen. Her own house is gone; this is a modern building of stacked cubes and mirrored glass standing where the church she was baptised in once stood, with a chapel upstairs and a small display of letters and belongings below. It takes half an hour and it is free.

Finish underground, in the sunken courtyard of the small Orthodox church that had to be dug into the ground because the Ottomans would not permit a church to stand taller than a mosque. Inside is a wooden iconostasis carved over ten years in the 1820s, with faces of the carvers hidden in it, and outside is the tomb of the revolutionary who is the national hero of this country.

Coffee on the square, and then the airport.