Two Capitals: Skopje and Sofia

Leaving Ohrid for Bitola came with an unplanned show.

The bus was delayed, so I killed time at the station and ran into Nora and Oliver again — familiar faces from earlier in the trip, the kind of small coincidence that makes constant motion feel a little more connected. We piled into a cramped shuttle van, once again illustrating height bias.

Halfway to Bitola, the van stopped in a small town where about a dozen people were waiting to board. We had maybe five seats left. One very large, very insistent man made his case to the driver at full volume, his family shut out of the count. Police showed up within minutes.

Then the man’s brother roared up on a motorcycle, hopped off, and smacked the driver squarely in the back of the head.

What followed was chaos. The two brothers chased the driver around the parking lot while the police watched with roughly the urgency you’d bring to someone cutting in line at a coffee shop — a slow turn, mild interest, no real hurry. It felt less like an emergency and more like they’d seen this movie before.

More police cars eventually arrived — three by my count — followed by an enormous amount of paperwork. No one was arrested. The rattled driver finally got us back on the road, minus the brute’s family, turning our scheduled hour-and-fifteen-minute trip into nearly two and a half hours.

For the price of admission, it wasn’t a bad show.

Bitola arrived under gray, windy skies — a rougher, more lived-in cousin of Ohrid. I checked into a room overlooking the main plaza, napped off the day’s chaos, and settled into a simple dinner of local comfort food and beer before an early night ahead of the ride to Skopje.

Skopje: The Old Bazaar

The road to Skopje ran through rolling Macedonian countryside for three and a half hours, easy and quiet the whole way — a welcome contrast to the day before. I arrived to a balcony overlooking the Old Bazaar and felt the shift in energy immediately.

The Bazaar has been a center of trade for more than 600 years, built up over five centuries of Ottoman rule that didn’t end here until 1912, and it shows in every direction — tight streets, döner stands on every corner, Turkish tea poured constantly, trays of syrup-soaked pastries impossible to walk past without stopping. One stretch of street was lined entirely with gold and silver shops that wouldn’t look out of place in a much larger city. This part of Skopje is predominantly Muslim, largely ethnic Albanian alongside families whose roots run generations deep, and the call to prayer rolled across the rooftops five times a day — loud and unmissable from my balcony, a constant reminder of exactly where I was.

Dinner was tavče gravče, the classic baked bean dish, alongside ćevapi, because ćevapi seems to earn its keep everywhere in this region. Later I wandered into a small wine and cocktail bar called Ladies Bar, run by a serious Macedonian wine advocate named Trpe Nikoloski. He walked me through the country’s wine scene — more than two hundred wineries, only a handful of them large-scale, with the rest small, family-run operations — and poured me a glass of Vranec, a bold native red he claimed might be the original Zinfandel.

Any conversation about alcohol in the Balkans invariably swings to rakia, and this one naturally led to a tasting session. My Belgrade education was continuing.

Skopje: A Capital Reinventing Itself

Skopje is home to roughly a third of North Macedonia’s population, and its history shows in visible layers. Kale Fortress, originally built in the 6th century, sits above the Old Bazaar overlooking the river — the city’s original footprint, with everything else expanding outward from there over the centuries. A massive 1963 earthquake destroyed around 80 percent of the city, and what rose afterward, under Yugoslavia, was heavy, concrete, socialist-era architecture.

Then came the Skopje 2014 project, when the government didn’t just renovate parts of the capital—it attempted to reinvent the city’s image. Buildings were refaced almost overnight in a neoclassical, old-Europe style. Bridges across the Vardar River filled with statues. Statues turned up everywhere — warriors, kings, revolutionaries, most famously the towering central figure in the main square widely understood to depict Alexander the Great. The whole project was about identity: a young country, independent only since 1991, trying to root itself in a deeper historical narrative while signaling that it belongs in the modern European fold. Depending on who you ask, it’s either bold nation-building or a Disney-esque remake. Walking those easy streets, I found myself siding with the optimists.

There’s a quieter counterpoint to all that self-invention a few blocks away, at the Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia. Nearly 98 percent of the country’s Jewish population was gone by 1943, and the museum doesn’t shy away from that number. But what surprised me was how much space it gives to everything that came before the war — centuries of ordinary life, trade and neighborhoods and daily routine, long before any of it became a statistic. Standing in a city that spent 2014 rebuilding itself in marble and bronze, it was a reminder that Skopje’s real foundation isn’t the statues. It’s everyone who’s ever actually lived here.

That evening, over a cold pilsner, I fell into an easy conversation with the bartender, a local named El Fati, who’d spent time living in the Netherlands before coming home, about how people here see themselves and their place in the region — a country, in his words, still figuring out who it is.

I closed the night back at Ladies Bar with Trpe, rakia in hand, watching a backgammon game that felt thoroughly Turkish — a fitting preview, as it turned out, for what was waiting for me down the road in Istanbul.