A few years ago, I traveled through Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria. After a week in the country, I’m not (yet) an expert on Macedonian culture, but I had enough time to give you the right tools.
North Macedonia sits at the heart of the Balkans, shaped by centuries of empires, borders, and reinvention. For decades, it was part of Yugoslavia under Tito, before becoming independent in the 1990s.
More recently, a long dispute with Greece over the legacy of Alexander the Great led to the country changing its name to North Macedonia. Alexander the Great was born in the ancient Greek region of Macedonia, not in the country of Macedonia. That’s why Greece pushed for the name change. It went so far that the Alexander statue in Skopje is now called something else. It seems a little childish to me, but there’s a lot of money in tourism, and culture is really just the stories we tell about ourselves, which is why countries want to protect the stories that have become national identity.
What North Macedonia offers, though, is its own great history, a mix of Balkan, Mediterranean, and Ottoman cultures, and the beautiful and popular Lake Ohrid, filled with wonderful views and fresh food. Send me a message via the contact page if you want my tips 😉
North Macedonia has a rich tradition of novels, poetry, and plays. However, many classic works, like Petre M. Andreevski’s Pirey and Zhivko Chingo’s The Great Water (also a film), aren’t easily available in English.
I’ve nonetheless tried to put together a representative top 5 of books from Macedonian culture, but I’m always open to recommendations.
Brutally honest stories about women trapped between expectations, desire, and disappointment. Relationships crack, illusions collapse, and independence comes at a cost. Funny, sharp, and deeply uncomfortable in the best way.
Two conjoined twins growing up in post-Yugoslav Macedonia, dreaming of freedom in a world that stares, judges, and limits them. A powerful novel about identity, sisterhood, migration, and the price of wanting a different life.
The forgotten story of Sigmund Freud’s sister, left behind in Vienna while he escaped the Nazis. A haunting novel about family, abandonment, survival, and the people history chooses to remember, and those it erases.
Sharp, funny, and painfully honest stories about love, marriage, and modern Balkan life. Dark humor, toxic relationships, quiet rage, and women who refuse to stay silent.
Although the author is Bulgarian, not Macedonian, the journey takes place through the borderlands of Macedonia, Albania, and Greece. A trip that reflects on forgotten wars, smuggling routes, and a shared Yugoslavian history.
I was surprised by how many wonderful movies North Macedonia has produced.
I tried to feature some of the most important, beautiful, and interesting, but I’m planning to do a separate blog post with a top 10 Macedonian movies at some point.
The first Macedonian film to win an Oscar, and still one of the best war movies I’ve ever seen. Three interconnected stories between Macedonia and London show how violence repeats itself in cycles. Directed by Milcho Manchevski, who later made the beautiful Willow.
One of those films that stays with you. Hatidze lives alone in a remote village, caring for wild bees with an ancient rule: take half, leave half. I had no idea what that even meant before watching. A quiet, stunning story about balance, greed, and survival.
Neto is a young man who seems aimless and unmotivated. When his father finds him with drugs, he sends Neto to a psychiatric institution. Inside, the facility uses electric shocks and operates under perverse incentives to keep patients locked in. The extreme conditions ultimately do more harm than good. Based on a true
I’m Still Here is the first Brazilian film to win an Oscar. This political drama is based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, whose husband is abducted by the military regime. The film follows her 25-year fight to get the government to officially acknowledge his death. Eunice is portrayed by Fernanda Torres and, in later years, by her real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who also starred in Central do Brasil, Brazil’s last Oscar-nominated film, by the same director.
A Dog’s Will is an all-time Brazilian classic. It tells the story of some outlaws hired to kill a wealthy landowner in the sertão (the dry interior of northeastern Brazil). The film is a humorous take on the western genre and offers an insight into Northeastern Brazilian culture.
Here is a playlist with some of the best Macedonian songs!
