For my last stop on this trip I decided to explore the town of Štip, which I had visited briefly on my first trip to Macedonia in April 1997, but appeared from Thammy’s book to have a lot more to recommend it. Indeed, it is a good reminder of the intermingling of cultures in this part of the world (and not in fact very far from Stobi, if you want to combine the two some day as a good day trip from Skopje).

Here, for instance, is a dilapidated mosque, built on the ruins of an early Christian church:

Here is the monument in Freedom Square to Alexander the Great:

Here is the monument a bit further along the river to the 561 Jews deported from Štip to Treblinka:

And here is the Bezisten, a former bazaar:

…now doing service as an art gallery:

And, as all former Ottoman towns ought to have, an old clock tower:

Saturday is often a day for getting married in this part of the world:

And I finished off the visit, and my trip as a whole, with a visit to the Kežovica mineral springs for a very convincingly mineral-tasting hot shower. The bath complex nestles into a crook of the hills:

 
And a beautiful church overlooks it from the other side of the river.

 
And so to the airport, and then home.