Skopje, Macedonia

Skopje is the capital of North Macedonia, sitting on the upper Vardar River with roughly 540,000 residents and nearly 4,000 years of recorded occupation. The Old Bazaar, the largest Ottoman-era bazaar in the Balkans outside Istanbul, survived the 1963 earthquake that levelled much of the surrounding city. From there the 15th-century Stone Bridge crosses the river to Macedonia Square, where the Skopje 2014 project added dozens of neoclassical facades and statues to the modern center. What else waits on the far bank of the Vardar.