This is a roof tile, but not just any roof tile, this is from the 1873 railway station that was built in Skopje. It was demolished in 1937 to make way for the new central railway station, although that’s now mostly fallen down due to the earthquake in 1963. During the demolition of the city’s first railway station, it was suggested that two tiles and two bricks were taken as some sort of memory of Skopje’s early railway history. One of them is displayed here and I like that things such as this survive, it’s a little survivor of the arrival of the railways into the city.
This is what the city’s first railway station looked like, opened in 1873 when the Ottomans opened the line from Skopje to Thessaloniki in Greece. I’m not sure that the First Balkan War between 1912 and 1913 is much referenced in the history taught in UK schools (which seems to mostly be Tudors to trenches with a few mentions of steam engines, but there we go), but this is when the Ottoman Empire lose most of their European lands, include the city of Skopje.