A Season in Hell 2 - Homage to Macedonia

This used to be my favorite place

I arrived at my hotel in Skopje exhausted, dehydrated, ripped off by yet another taxi driver, but nonetheless eager to spend a few days reacquainting myself with a city that had been one of my old haunts at the dawn of the Trump era. I hadn’t been back to North Macedonia¹ since before the pandemic (and probably wouldn’t have gone at all if it wasn’t the only logical stop between Thessaloniki and Prizren) and had expected to feel some disappointment. Skopje used to be one of my favorite places in the former Yugoslavia. Much smaller than Belgrade, it sometimes felt like my own little secret. I spent a lot of time there reporting on successive protest movements against the nationalist government of then-Prime Minister Nikola (“Grujo”) Gruevski, who was ousted in 2016. But I didn’t expect my brief trip there to be quite so bleak.