Promenade · city of consuls
Bitola's 900 m pedestrian promenade of pastel neoclassical houses and cafés, once lined with foreign consulates.
These are the stories you can open in the 3D view, each at its own numbered point on the model.
Širok Sokak means "wide street": širok is the local word for wide, and sokak is Turkish for street. This pedestrian promenade runs for about 900 metres, from Magnolia Square in the north to the City Park and the Officers' Home in the south. Its official name is Maršal Tito Street. The model shows a stretch of about 120 metres around the Manaki cinema.
Under Ottoman rule, in the time of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the street was called Hamidie or Sultanie. After 1913 it became Kral Petar, King Peter Street, and later Maršal Tito. In everyday speech, though, people in Bitola simply call it Širok Sokak.
In the late Ottoman period Bitola, then called Manastır, hosted many foreign consulates and became known as the "city of consuls". Sources disagree on how many there were: about 12 between 1878 and 1912, or up to about 20. Several former consulate buildings stand on or near this street. Today the city has 13 consulates, two general and eleven honorary.
Most houses along the street have two or three storeys, with shops and cafés on the ground floor. Their façades are painted in pastel ochre, cream and yellow and framed with white pilasters, cornices and window pediments. Wrought-iron balconies rest on stone brackets, and some corner houses end in curved gables or balustrades.
In the evening Širok Sokak becomes the korzo, the place for a slow walk up and down the street. The café terraces on both sides fill up. Locals have a word for lingering at a café table to see and be seen: "kabadaenje". A person who does it is a "kabadaja".
Yanaki Manaki (1878–1954) and Milton Manaki (1882–1964) were Aromanian photographers from Avdella. In 1904 they bought a plot on this street for their studio. Around 1905 they filmed their 114-year-old grandmother spinning, "The Weavers", often called the first film shot in the Balkans. The hand-cranked camera on this corner stands in for their Bioscope camera No. 300.
Bitola's first cinema opened in 1921 as an open-air screen and moved indoors in 1923. Today it carries the brothers' name. The building burned in 1939 and was rebuilt later. Its cream façade, with tall glazed doors, four pilasters and a curved gable, faces the street from the east side.
In front of the cinema, stars for cinematographers are set into the pavement. They belong to the International Cinematographers' Film Festival "Manaki Brothers", held in Bitola since 1979, whose awards include the Camera 300. Laureates include Sven Nykvist and Vilmos Zsigmond. Since 2015 Bitola has been a UNESCO City of Film. In this model the stars are left without names.
Typical prices are our estimates for orientation, not menu prices. Check opening hours on the spot.
Walk around the model, switch between day and night, and hear each story read aloud in English, Macedonian or Turkish.
Open in 3D
