After our time in Ohrid, we drove 3 hours to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia. Before this trip, we had never even heard about Skopje, and it was a really fun city to visit.
Having switched hands over time, Skopje is a culturally diverse city where you can find Byzantine churches, monasteries, and Roman sites alongside mosques and other Ottoman-influenced buildings. In recent years, the city has built up a series of new bridges and towering statues, giving Skopje a new look. Exploring the city center feels like walking through a sculpture garden at times, which makes it a cool place to explore, especially with kids!
Our Airbnb apartment was located a bit outside the city center, in a building complex surrounded by pedestrian areas filled with green spaces and playgrounds. We were close to the river walkway, which you can take to reach the center on foot but, with two young kids with us and only one stroller, walking the 3.5 km was just too long. Instead, we chose to drive to a parking area close to the center and then walk for about 10-15 to see the main sights. Overall, we went out to sightsee in the mornings and spent the afternoons around our apartment, playing outside and letting the kids ride around on their scooters!
These are some of the things we did during our time in Skopje:
- The day we arrived to Skopje, the weather changed from warm summer to chilly fall, and some of us were not ready for the sudden change in weather (Paola wasn’t!). We headed to Skopje City Mall to find a couple of shirts with sleeves and to get a long sleeve for each kid (since they refuse to stop growing and are starting to outgrow some of the clothes from the start of the trip). The mall was big and had all the major stores as well as a big and well-stocked supermarket, a great bookstore with a fantastic selection of children’s books in English, a bowling alley, and lots of place to eat or get a cup of coffee.
- After our shopping day at the mall, we went back to give the bowling alley a try. This was the first time our kids had ever been bowling and it was a lot of fun! Hugo loved bowling and Valentina loved snacking her way through the game.
- We visited Mother Teresa’s Memorial House. Mother Teresa was born in Skopje and the memorial house commemorating her sits where the old Catholic Church “Sacred Heart of Jesus” used to be. It was in this church that Mother Teresa was baptized a day after her birth. The memorial house is free to the public and you can come here to learn more about who Mother Teresa was and what she did to become a saint.
- We wandered around the old town and checked out the many pedestrian bridges and statues. Some of the most impressive sights were The Warrior on a Horse (Alexander the Great) in Macedonia Square, the Stone Bridge built in the 6th century by the Byzantines, a giant statue of Phillip the Second of Macedonia, and a fountain with a statue depicting Olympia (Alexander the Great’s mother) breastfeeding Alexander.
- We spent an afternoon getting lost in the narrow pedestrian streets of the Old Bazaar. Skopje’s Old Bazaar is the largest bazaar in the Balkans outside Istanbul and it’s a super lively place to visit, get a cup of coffee or a bite to eat. The bazaar has been a center of commence in the city since the 1200s! While walking around the Old Bazaar, a store keeper stopped us and told us he’d seen Valentina three times already and that not giving her a gift would bring him bad luck, so he gave her a pair of shoe-shaped magnets. Isn’t that lovely? We grabbed dinner at The Old Town Brewery (Pivnica Star Grad), which has outdoor seating and is right next to the fortress.
- We went on a day trip to Matka Canyon, one of Macedonia’s best attractions and a great place to enjoy the great outdoors! We hiked up the canyon, past the dam, and for a total of US$8 ($4 per adult) we took a motorboat down the canyon for about 4km. The scenery was gorgeous! You can also hike the canyon on a narrow path but we chose not to do it because the railing was not the safest for hiking with little kids. Nonetheless, the boat ride was a great way to experience the canyon!
We didn’t visit the fortress that sits on top of a hill behind the Old Bazaar. It is supposed to be a major attraction but we just didn’t quite squeeze it in. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been visiting forts, castles, and palaces for the past 5 months!
We could have easily spent more than 5 days in Skopje, enjoying the cafe life, wandering around the narrow alleys of the Old Bazaar, and checking out the city’s statues. Overall, we really enjoyed Skopje! We thought it was a very child-friendly place and would definitely recommend it to other traveling families.
