They open out on to vistas dominated by the overblown public buildings of the socialist era, rebadged with new national symbols. Here and there a fine old villa or commercial building, a church, mosque, or Ottoman market survives. Layered over this are the banks, offices and often already tatty shopping malls of the new capitalism, with their Arizona Fast Food places, quick English language courses, cyber cafes, and Kalifornia video shops. Through them mooch handsome adolescents in platform shoes, searching for tapes, nail polish and each other. In the restaurants their elders consume, with slight religious variations, the standard Balkan suicide diet of too much tobacco, alcohol, coffee, meat, gossip and jokes.
People are almost uniformly good natured and courteous.
It is difficult to imagine that two cities so apparently similar could go to war with each other, or that the mixed city of Skopje could go to war with itself. Yet that is, unhappily, a possibility, if still a remote one. When the EU drafted an association agreement with Macedonia last year, wise heads in Brussels believed they were taking in a country that was overcoming its divisions, not one in danger of being overwhelmed by them. But, as next Monday's final signing ceremony in Luxembourg approaches, it is evident that Europe is embracing a society which may be a problem for years to come, even if it avoids another bout of violence in the near future. Could ethnic harmony be assured by sheer weight of political celebrity, it would already be established in Macedonia.