Skopje
— — a city the river divides and the centuries restitch.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of North Macedonia, set on the Vardar and crossed by an Ottoman stone bridge that has stood since the 15th century. The 1963 earthquake took most of the old city; the new one rose around what survived. Mother Teresa was born in a house a few streets from the bridge in 1910. The Old Bazaar still smells of grilled meat and Turkish coffee at dusk.
Skopje, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Skopje sits on the Vardar river in a basin ringed by Mount Vodno to the south and the Skopska Crna Gora range to the north, at an elevation of around 240 metres. It is the capital of North Macedonia and home to roughly 530,000 people, about a quarter of the country's population. The Stone Bridge across the Vardar, built under the Ottomans in the 15th century, still carries pedestrians between the Old Bazaar (Čaršija) on the north bank and Macedonia Square on the south. Roman Scupi sat a few kilometres upstream until an earthquake levelled it in AD 518.
The Stone Bridge has thirteen semicircular arches and runs about 214 metres across the Vardar, the spine of the city since at least 1469. North of it the Old Bazaar holds the largest contiguous Ottoman-era market in the Balkans outside Istanbul, with the Mustafa Pasha Mosque from 1492 and the Kuršumli An caravanserai from the 16th century. The 2014 reconstruction programme added neoclassical facades, fountains, and bronze statues to the south bank, including a 22-metre figure of a warrior on horseback at the centre of Macedonia Square.
At 5:17 in the morning on 26 July 1963 a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck Skopje, killing more than 1,070 people and destroying about 80 percent of the city in roughly twenty seconds. The recovery drew architects from around the world; the Japanese modernist Kenzō Tange led the master plan for the new centre. The old railway station, its clock stopped at the hour of the quake, now houses the Museum of the City of Skopje. The Stone Bridge survived with only minor damage and still stands today.