North Macedonia

Skopje hit me hard before I even left Macedonia Square. The square is an exercise in overstatement — colonnaded museums, colossal bronze warriors on horseback, fountains ringing with bronze figures — all of it new, all of it insisting on an ancient identity. I walked around it in the early morning when the stone was still cool and the light came flat off the mountains behind the city. At that hour, with nobody around, it felt oddly moving instead of absurd.

Ohrid was a different North Macedonia entirely. The road from Skopje drops you into a world of old stone, vine-covered walls, and that lake — blue in a way that doesn't feel real until you're standing at the cliff's edge above the Church of St. John at Kaneo and realising the water actually goes that colour. The church is tiny, Byzantine, crumbling just enough to feel honest. The air smelled of pine and heat and something faintly mineral from the lake.

The food was the part I wasn't prepared for. I sat down for what I thought would be a quick meal and got a wooden board the size of a cartwheel piled with cevapi, kofte, roasted peppers, ajvar, and things I couldn't name. The restaurant was strung with warm bulbs and smelled of charcoal. The Macedonians eat like they're in no hurry and I respect that completely.