When you walk into Skopje, you feel like the city is a little wacky. At first there are a few statues. Then you realise they have so many statues that you can’t walk 5 metres without finding one.
Skopje, the capital city of Macedonia, is like a mini Las Vegas without all the bright lights. There are statues everywhere. Many of these statues and also many of the buildings and features seem to be ‘copy and pasted’ from different parts of the world.
‘copy and pastes’ include:
- the wall street bull (in front of a shoe shop)
- an arch based on the Paris’ Arc de Triomphe
- the Art Bridge meant to resemble the Charles Bridge in Prague
- multiple government buildings constructed of white marble in neo-classic Roman style
We went on a walking tour with a former economist who wasn’t overly impressed with the ridiculous amount of his tax dollars that were being spent adding to the statue collection. Most of the statues have been constructed in recent times as Skopje experienced a significant earthquake in 1963 which brought down the city. The main bronze statues are less than 5 years old, including the 22m high fountain with Alexander the Great ontop. While on the tour our guide even pointed out a statue of a horse that wasn’t there last month. These have been put up as part of a project to revamp the city called ‘Skopje 2014’.
The ‘Skopje 2014’ project has gotten a lot of criticism for the huge sums of money that have been poured into it while major cuts have been made in capital investment, education and health budgets. Our tour guide even had a story for us about how 250,000 euro was spent on three willows imported from New Zealand and planted on platforms in the Vardar River. Unfortunately for Skopje two out of the three willows were not looking so healthy while we were there.
Skopje was a great city for exploring. Everytime we went for a walk we encountered something bizarre or different.
While there we also made a day trip out to Matka Canyon for some hiking. We ended up on a few paths that hadn’t been used in a while that took us down to a hydro-dam. Accompanying us on our hike was a stray dog that looked like it was having a pretty rough, flea-filled life. He was very sneaky and followed about 50 metres behind us the whole afternoon. Skopje has a policy of neutering and tagging stray animals so most of the animals wandering around are calm and not at all aggressive. We were so impressed with his persistence we decided to give him our last slice of pizza. Unfortunately for him, just before we were about to throw him the slice, a security guard came out to get us off the dam.
