This is Skopje’s former railway station which was built between 1938 and 1940 and was designed by the Serbian architect Velimir Gavrilović. At 05:17 on 26 July 1963, an earthquake struck Skopje which killed over 1,070 people, injured thousands more and destroyed about 80 percent of the city. The clock on the facade of the railway station stopped at the exact moment the tremor struck.
This is what it looks like now, the left hand side of the station has gone, the central section is mostly standing and the right hand side has been turned into a museum. More on that in future posts.
A photograph from the time shows the damage and this scene isn’t recognisable today other than the surviving bit of the railway station, as there’s now a large shopping centre where the railway line once was. That’s a little symbolic of the city perhaps, there needs to be a significant overhaul of the current central railway station, a brutalist designed building that needs repair, but the new Diamond shopping centre is quite decadent and evidently expensive to have built.
It was decided to keep this damaged section, now in the garden of the museum, as a memorial. There’s a sharp bluntness about keeping a broken building, it’s quite powerful.
It was interesting to see how it was constructed and a little sub-optimal that it lasted under 25 years. It had been constructed on the site of the city’s first main railway station that opened in 1873, but more on that later as well. Such excitement stored up and my two loyal blog readers can pace themselves accordingly.
The remaining arches can be seen from the rear. It’s nice that there’s a little museum here for free, although that’s more about the city’s history, but there is a video playing inside which gives more information about the earthquake and the massive damage that it did to the city.