Skopje: The Breathtaking City Filled With Confidence

Why do we do it to ourselves? Our lives are short and the world is so interesting. So why do we spend so money of our weekends away in well behaved cities that are so meek and mild, so boring and band? Macedonia’s capital in anything but. Skopje has swagger. It swears and pokes, it jolts and jostles, it preens and poses. Walking around it is like a night out with Alex Higgins. Snowy peaks punch above it, a muddy river slices through it, drivers speed around in mud-caked cars narrowly avoiding fatal smashes, stray dogs bark and pout, beautiful women look dismissive, fat men smoke and squabble, the air is thick with all kinds of opportunities, many of them sinful.

It’s a city that’s alive. Most of all it is exotic, and that exoticism seeps from every pore. North of the River Vardar, minarets puncture a smoggy sky, and the bazaar throbs with a million sensations. The call to prayer echoes from tinny loudspeakers, the smell of Turkish tea wafts along, switchback alleys offer that most delicious possibility: the chance to get completely lost in a place where you see virtually no Western European tourists, hear virtually no English or French or Italian apart from the names of famous football players shouted at TVs. Creaky wooden buildings lean over each other, shoddy souvenirs are flogged by shysters who wink and waggle fingers.

An Ottoman spice grinder? Yeah, I think, why not? I make a mental note to check nothing’s been stashed inside it before I go through customs. A slice of burek? Yep – the spinach and feta one, always the spinach and feta one. I try to remember the name of the stall where I buy the flaky pastry pie – the Balkans’ second most popular export after Drina fags – but even if I were a better journalist I’d never find it. Just go looking, you won’t regret it.

Serendipity, rather than good research and keen mapping skills, bring me to the Water Inn and then the old hammam that signal how important the Ottomans were during their five centuries of colonisation of these lands. Their dominance ended at the river, where the famous old Stone Bridge sails out from the Muslim world and lands in the Christian one. On a wall, on the Muslim side, graffiti in English (for maximum effect) reads “fuck nationalism”. Someone has tried to scribble it out – probably the police and probably because the current right-wing government is very much for nationalism.

And that’s why the centre of Skopje now looks like nothing less than a Las Vegas mega-resort, an unholy marriage of The Bellagio and Caesars Palace with hundreds of yard sale statues thrown in for free. These new buildings are an absolute architectural abomination with their pediments and whitewash. But they’re gripping and they’re absolutely a part of what this city is all about. This is what happens when former communist countries try to jettison the 20th century. There’s a new theatre that looks like a belle epoque theatre and a new archaeological museum that looks like a casino. The whole point of this Skopje 2014 ruse was to project a civilised, cultured, mitteleuropa feel.

The end result is the exact opposite – it looks like a despot’s playground in Central Asia or the Gulf. Macedonia wants to connect with Europe, to be more western. This comical building spree makes the place feel as sinister as Bahrain or Baku. Still, you can’t stop looking – the city is like a huge theme park. Skopje today is trying to look back. A huge guy on a horse in Macedonia Square is supposed to make you think of Alexander the Great. He was the Macedonian icon who cowed even the Persians, a national hero who also has the airport named after him. And looking on to the square is a new Marriott hotel, which is currently being built. Except it looks like something from fin de siecle Paris. The sense of surrealism and absolute confidence on display is breathtaking. Sensibilities are offended at will.

And in a sense that’s nothing new. Because the city’s best buildings were doing that when they were built in the 1960s. The difference is that they were looking towards an exciting, rational future, too. The problem for them now is that future was a communist one. Skopje wras flattened by an earthquake in 1963 and the rebuild was spectacular. It could have been even more spectacular. The famous Japanese architect Kenzo Tange proposed a whole series of superblocks that would have made Skopje look like the most futuristic city on earth, never mind in Europe. Some of the plan was realised, and space-station chic is still alive and well in the telephone exchange and post office complex, which is a perfect piece of brutalist bluster – hard, heavy, abstract and annoying.

It’s a head-scratching delight. The railway station is zen; minimal – austere concrete boxes rise above eerily empty platforms creating one of the most remarkable railway stations you’ve ever laid eyes on. The Skopje City Mall is a multi-level riot of shops, markets, picture framers and clothes menders. By its side, jutting up to the river, are dozens of bars that pump out Eurodisco into the early hours. Plonked on top of the mall is the Holiday Inn, with its mix of communist kitsch and decor from an episode of Dallas.

I love it, and eating a solitary breakfast of fat olives and crumbly sheep’s cheese, plump tomatoes and aubergines in a room surrounded by mirrors, I allow my mind to play out my war reporter fantasies – didn’t war reporters in the Balkans always stay in a Holiday Inn? There’s so much to look at in Skopje -the remarkable 1960s towers of the National Bank of Macedonia, the postmodern museum on the site of the house where Mother Teresa was born, the shocking new triumphal arch leading off Macedonia Square.

Your lungs will fill with ciggie smoke, exhaust smoke, the stench of chestnuts roasting at stands on corners, the noise of banging and clattering as yet more new monuments go up. Skopje is busy, buzzing, bolshy. This is an old city in a very new country that’s finding its feet. And, despite the way it all overwhelms you, there is a spirit that’s pure at the heart of it all. The people here are welcoming and friendly, even the dogs are – they won’t bite you, they’ll just look mournful. Life’s too short to go to boring places. Come here instead.