I wandered around the city for a few minutes in the morning to get the lay of the land. It's a strange place. Along the central river, there a ton of giant marble buildings that look very classical. There are a ton of bridges covered by statues and it's all designed to echo Greek and (I suppose) ancient Macedonian stylings. These buildings, very strangely, reminded me in a way of Washington DC with their density and uniqueness. They all feel as if they're trying to be somehow monumental, and mostly succeed in that except that they're undercut by the rest of the city. Nearby, there are typical crumbling commie blocks and some which aren't actually crumbling but also aren't even close to being finished (yet no construction is being done to). Word on the street is that these were started under one government and abandoned once they lost power. In the river there are two ships. Neither are actually floating on water (the river looks to not be more than a few feet deep at any point), but built on some sort of support structure in the banks. One of them appears to be a restaurant or bar of some sort, while the other is completely ruined. I walked around its levels for a few minutes but it's so completely full of trash and so thoroughly decayed that I didn't feel very safe doing so. On the north side of the river there's an immense bazaar that's clearly from the Ottoman days, and a giant ruined fortress that's been added on to by successive conquering empires over the past 2000 years. There's also an enormous statue of Phillip II of Macedonia (Alexander's father), though even this is dwarfed by the ridiculously large statue of Alexander himself.

All that's to say, this city isn't Hellenic in way, though it tries its hardest to convince you otherwise. The people here aren't Macedonian in the sense that Alexander or Phillip were - they're Slavs, they speak a Slavic language (basically just Bulgarian, so everything is in Cyrillic), and have absolutely no cultural, historical, or linguistic ties to the empire that conquered the Achaemenids. Even geographically, this city is on the very fringe of the region that one could consider Macedonia, and all the important sites of ancient Macedonian culture are in modern day Greece. The word "Macedonia" was completely forgotten for well over a thousand years and only came back into use in the 1800s thanks to some Bulgarian nationalists who resurrected it to call back to the days when this part of the world was its most dominant power (mind you, Alexander's empire fractured and disintegrated almost immediately when he died about 15 years after it began, and the entire Macedonian sphere was subsumed by the Romans within the following 300 years, so it's not like this is an especially large window of time). But they know that they've got nothing else to go off of aside from the rather sad history of being conquered by the greater powers that flourished on either side of them, so they - rather dishonestly if I'm being totally frank - try to claim this totally unrelated history as their own based off nothing more than a vague geographic proximity.

The funniest part about all of this is that the Greeks claim Alexander as their own as well, somewhat more justifiably if you ask me, and the North Macedonians absolutely hate them for it. The hostel owner and his daughter both spent a while complaining to me about the appropriation of their history by the Greeks (and Bulgarians, though I can't really evaluate that claim), even though, again, they have only the most tenuous possible links to these figures. The owner was telling me that the area was rooting for the Mavericks in the NBA finals last year since Luka Doncic is from a former Yugoslav state, but absolutely hate Giannis Antetokounmpo since he's Greek. The people here are still extremely mad that they were forced to change the name to "North Macedonia" instead of simply "Macedonia", even though a considerable majority of the region of Macedonia lies in Greece and Bulgaria. I'll admit that simply "Macedonia" is much less cumbersome to say.

Ok, rant over. I met up with Oscar and we went to explore the fortress, which has clearly seen better days. Some of its observation platforms were almost totally collapsed and there were weird shells of modern buildings lying within its walls. Not sure what happened there. We checked out the nearby bazaar, which is a total mess of people hawking absolutely everything you could possibly imagine. It's this area that feels the most actually Ottoman, while most of the other parts of the city are mostly Yugoslav in character. We went to the national museum, which is decent though very small. I appreciated Oscar's commentary and classical history degree since he could add a lot of context that the museum itself didn't provide. We got dinner (everything here is still dirt cheap) and then a few drinks at the local craft brewery. It was ok, but I've had much better beer elsewhere. I went back to my hostel, chatted with the owner's daughter - she works the night shift I guess - a little about her thoughts on Macedonian history and their relationship with the other Balkans. She made a valiant, though ultimately unsuccessful, effort to complain about Albanians without sounding extremely racist. I've become extremely pro-Albanian ever since they showered me with praise simply for being American and since Oscar showed me this incredible song that looks to be straight out of a Kosovar Borat knockoff. She also said that she doesn't hate Serbia, which is a first for my Balkan travels aside from Serbia itself of course. That owes to their entirely peaceful secession from Yugoslavia, a luxury not afforded to any of the other states. I talked some more with an American woman who came in very late while I was doing laundry and then went to bed. For all my complaining about the attitudes of the people here and their silly historical revisionism, the city is actually really charming and quirky in a way. Not a whole lot going on, but I'm glad I saw it. Onto Ohrid tomorrow.