A brief recounting of the Balkan getaway in February, 2025
It’s been almost a year since our visit to Skopje, and later Albania and Montenegro. The Balkans are enduringly fascinating to me, and it had been decades since I first visited these places. Never in more recent memory have I felt such an urge to take two months and wander.
In 1987, the Yugoslav city of Skopje (now independent North Macedonia) was gratifyingly bucolic, a provincial outpost marked by weird brutalist architecture in the center and rows of barracks-like high-rise housing on the periphery, both legacies of the 1963 earthquake that destroyed most of the city.
Hip Hops: Pivo in Skopje with the greatest seismologist of them all (1987)
Some of both remain, albeit submerged by an extensive and thoroughly kitschy remaking of downtown that is without parallel in Europe, and maybe anywhere else.
Communist and brutalist buildings have been given neoclassical or baroque Potemkin wrappings, new grandiose edifices have been erected along with fountains and staircases, and hundreds of statues pop up from every conceivable direction.
Skopje might be the world’s first purpose-built Instagramable, TikTokening capital; it’s like a wild and crazy movie set, and oddly, I rather enjoyed it, although many citizens sensibly question...
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