City museum · clock stopped at 5:17
The surviving part of the railway station, whose clock stopped at 5:17 in the 1963 earthquake; now the city museum.
These are the stories you can open in the 3D view, each at its own numbered point on the model.
This was Skopje's railway station, built in the 1930s at the south end of what is now pedestrian Macedonia Street. The tall central block is faced in large pale stone panels and almost blank; a two-storey wing runs to the north-west and a lower one to the south-east. What you see is about one third of the original building. The rest was lost in 1963.
High on the stone face, metal numerals and two hands make up the station clock. It stopped at 5:17, the moment the earthquake struck on the morning of 26 July 1963, and it has been left that way. It is the best-known image of the disaster, and it can be seen from the street at any hour.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 6.1 and lasted about twenty seconds. More than a thousand people died, more than two hundred thousand lost their homes, and about eighty per cent of the city was destroyed. The city was rebuilt, but the station clock above you was left as it stopped, at the minute of the disaster.
After the earthquake Skopje was rebuilt with help from many countries, mostly in plain modernist forms: concrete and glass blocks of five to twelve storeys with flat roofs. The ruined part of the station was not rebuilt; what survived was kept. The buildings round it, including the large shopping centre behind, are much newer.
Since 1970 the surviving building has housed the Museum of the City of Skopje, founded in 1949 and first opened on 11 October 1951. It holds about 22,000 objects in archaeology, history, ethnology and art history, and the Lubomir Belogaski gallery. The museum also runs the Museum of the Old Bazaar in Suli An. It is closed on Mondays.
The wing to the north-west keeps the rhythm of the station: square windows on two floors and, near the top, a row of small round-arched windows. The south-east wing is a single storey, set back from the street. Both are flat-roofed and faced in stone of a warmer brown than the pale central block. On the roof of the central block a mast carries the national flag.
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
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