North Macedonia
Who ruled Skopje?
Skopje dates from about 3500 BCE. On our historical maps, the ground it stands on has been drawn inside 16 different states, empires and peoples. Read the history of North Macedonia.
The history of Skopje
Skopje lies on the upper Vardar River in the north of North Macedonia, where the river leaves a mountain gorge and crosses a broad basin. The Vardar valley is the main north-south route through the central Balkans, linking the Danube lands to Thessaloniki and the Aegean, so the town has always been a junction and a prize. Its history has been shaped by changes of empire, by more than five centuries of Ottoman rule, and by earthquakes, above all the one that destroyed much of the city in 1963.
People were living on the Kale hill, the rocky height above the river crossing, by about 4000 BCE. In Roman times the main settlement, Scupi, stood a few kilometres to the north-west. It became a Roman colony for veterans and later the chief town of the province of Dardania, and it had a bishop by the fourth century. An earthquake levelled Scupi in 518 CE. The emperor Justinian I, born in a village nearby, is often said to have rebuilt the town, though historians debate exactly where.
In the early Middle Ages Slavic settlers moved into the valley and the town, now on its present site around the Kale, passed back and forth between the Byzantine Empire and the Bulgarian rulers. Byzantium held it for most of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Bulgarian rulers again in parts of the thirteenth, and in 1282 the Serbian king Stefan Milutin took it. His grandson Stefan Dušan was crowned emperor of the Serbs and Greeks in Skopje in 1346, briefly making it the capital of a large Balkan empire.
Üsküb under the Ottomans
The Ottoman Empire captured the town in 1392 and held it, as Üsküb, until 1912. Under Ottoman rule it gained the stone bridge over the Vardar in its present form, mosques such as the Mustafa Pasha Mosque of 1492, inns for caravans, baths and a sprawling bazaar, which still makes up the old quarter on the left bank. Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Jewish and Roma communities lived side by side. In 1689, during a war with the Habsburgs, the Austrian general Piccolomini occupied the town and his troops set it on fire as they withdrew, perhaps to halt an outbreak of plague. Üsküb recovered slowly, and the arrival of the railway from Thessaloniki in 1873 revived its trade.
In the First Balkan War of 1912 Serbian troops took the city, and after the First World War it became part of the new South Slav kingdom, renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. During the Second World War it was occupied by Bulgaria, and in 1943 the city's Jewish community was deported to Treblinka and murdered. Mother Teresa was born in Skopje in 1910 to an Albanian Catholic family.
From 1945 Skopje was the capital of the Macedonian republic within Tito's Yugoslavia. On 26 July 1963 an earthquake killed more than a thousand people and destroyed most of the city's buildings. International aid poured in, and a master plan by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange shaped much of the concrete modernist centre. Skopje became capital of an independent state in 1991; after a long dispute with Greece over the name, the country adopted the name North Macedonia in 2019. A government building programme in the 2010s, known as Skopje 2014, added many statues and neoclassical facades. The city has around half a million inhabitants, about a quarter of the national population.
In pictures
3 images · scroll →Timeline
21 periods- 123,000 BCE – 10,000 BCENeanderthalMap of 123,000 BCE →
- 10,000 BCE – 1500 BCENo state drawn here on the mapMap of 10,000 BCE →
- 1500 BCE – 500 BCEThraceMap of 1500 BCE →
- 500 BCE – 400 BCENo state drawn here on the mapMap of 500 BCE →
- 400 BCE – 323 BCEHallstatt cultureMap of 400 BCE →
- 323 BCE – 200 BCENo state drawn here on the mapMap of 323 BCE →
- 200 BCE – 100 BCEDardaniaMap of 200 BCE →
- 100 BCE – 1 BCENo state drawn here on the mapMap of 100 BCE →
- 1 BCE – 300 CERoman EmpireMap of 1 BCE →
- 300 CE – 400 CERome (Galerius)Map of 300 CE →
- 400 CE – 800 CEEastern Roman EmpireMap of 400 CE →
- 800 CE – 900 CEAvarsMap of 800 CE →
- 900 CE – 1000 CEBulgarsMap of 900 CE →
- 1000 CE – 1100 CEBulgar KhanateMap of 1000 CE →
- 1100 CE – 1200 CEByzantine EmpireMap of 1100 CE →
- 1200 CE – 1279 CESecond Bulgarian EmpireMap of 1200 CE →
- 1279 CE – 1400 CEByzantine EmpireMap of 1279 CE →
- 1400 CE – 1914 CEOttoman EmpireMap of 1400 CE →
- 1914 CE – 1920 CESerbiaMap of 1914 CE →
- 1920 CE – 1994 CEYugoslaviaMap of 1920 CE →
- 1994 CE – todayMacedoniaMap of 1994 CE →
Quick answers
- Who rules Skopje today?
- On the latest map, Skopje is in Macedonia.
- Who ruled Skopje the longest?
- On our maps, the Ottoman Empire, for about 514 years (1400 CE to 1914 CE).
- How many times has Skopje changed hands?
- Our maps show it passing to a new ruler 11 times since 1 CE.
- Who ruled Skopje in 1 CE, 1000, 1500 and 1900?
- In 1 CE: Roman Empire. In 1000: Bulgar Khanate. In 1500: Ottoman Empire. In 1900: Ottoman Empire.
Dates are the years of our map snapshots, which are decades or centuries apart, so a change shown between two years happened at some point in that gap. The borders come from the historical-basemaps project and are approximate, especially for the ancient world and for peoples without fixed frontiers.
Skopje on this site
- Born in Skopje
- Mother Teresa (1910–1997)
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