Skopje

Skopje is two cities stitched by a fifteenth-century bridge: north of the Vardar, the Old Bazaar goes about its Ottoman business — coppersmiths, grill-masters, tea in tulip glasses — as it has for five hundred years; south, a government project filled the center with fountains, bronze lions and statues at a density that makes visitors laugh and locals shrug. Between the two stands the Stone Bridge, patient as ever, and above everything the Millennium Cross on Vodno, visible from every argument.

The sensible traveller gives the morning to the Čaršija — burek and coffee, the Kale fortress walls, the painted Mustafa Pasha mosque —, crosses the Stone Bridge to count warriors and fountains with an amused eye, takes the long lunch in Debar Maalo where grill smoke is a municipal feature, and escapes in the afternoon to Matka Canyon, twenty minutes away, where the lake slides between cliffs and the city turns suddenly theoretical. Mother Teresa was born here; her memorial house is a quiet counterpoint downtown.

The Guide's honesty: the statue program is best enjoyed as opera — argue about it like a local, over rakija —; the 1963 earthquake took the old center, which is why the railway-station clock still reads 5:17: the Old Bazaar is the surviving truth, give it the best hours; and the Vodno cable car up to the cross costs little and pays out the entire valley.