Elusive centres of a Balkan city: Skopje between undesirable and reluctant heritage

This paper examines competing forms of heritage in central Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia. It shows how Macedonian law came to officially protect the city’s Old Bazaar as cultural heritage of special importance in 2007. Yet the Bazaar constitutes a ‘reluctant heritage’ because locals have associated Ottoman-period architecture with Albanians, amidst ethno-political tensions between Albanians and Macedonians that have persisted since the socialist period. This heritage coexists in an uneasy tension with another ‘undesirable heritage’, namely, that of the socialist modernist architecture erected after a 1963 earthquake. In addition to tracing these competing forms of heritage, this article discusses the effects of the ‘Skopje 2014ʹ project and underscores the relation of state-power to processes of heritage-making and gentrification in the city.