Cemeteries to visit Northern Macedonia

This cemetery (Француски Гробишта/Francuski Grobišta) houses the bodies of 13,262 soldiers of the French Army of the East who died in the First World War. Established in 1923, it is the most important French military cemetery of this conflict abroad. It also houses the "Bitola Memorial", a museum inaugurated by the French Minister of Veterans Affairs in 2018. Covering an area of 3 hectares, the site is impressive, with the graves of 6,134 identified soldiers and those of a further 128 unidentified soldiers divided into four squares, as well as an ossuary containing the remains of 7,000 mostly identified men. On the graves or in the memorial registers, the families of the "poilus d'Orient" come to look for the name of an ancestor buried in Bitola. There are Émile, Joseph and Fernand, but also Abdalla, Rabah and Mohammed. The list is long. It recalls the heavy price paid by colonial troops during the "Verdun of the Balkans": the siege of Monastir/Bitola by the German and Bulgarian armies from November 1916 to September 1918.

Memorial. Housed in a building next to the janitor's house, the memorial is small but well designed. In the first room, photographs by the Manaki brothers document the daily lives of civilians and soldiers in the bombed-out city. The second room details the lives of twelve French, Senegalese and Madagascan soldiers. The words are harsh. Like those written by soldier Joseph Toutain (1895-1980) to his family in Orne, on March 19, 1917: "I [received] a bullet in the neck, it came out behind the ear." Although the cemetery is open to the public, the memorial is often closed. To prepare your visit and make sure the janitor is present, it's best to make an appointment with the French consulate in Bitola. In the rest of the Balkans, there are five other large cemeteries or French military squares from the First World War: Seddülbahir (Turkey) with 12,235 bodies, Thessalonica (Greece) with 8,310 bodies, Skopje with 2,930 bodies, Sofia (Bulgaria) with 789 bodies and Korça (Albania) with 640 bodies. Lastly, other small isolated squares or foreign military cemeteries also house the remains of soldiers who died for France. Such is the case of the British military cemetery at Doïrani, near Lake Dojran on the border between Greece and Northern Macedonia, where an unknown French soldier lies buried.

This 75 ha cemetery (Гробишта Бутел/Grobišta Butel) is the largest in the Skopje metropolitan area. Among the thousands of graves is that of Georgios Zorbas (1865-1941), famous for inspiring the writer Nikos Kazantzakis to write his short story Zorba the Greek in 1946. Embodied by Anthony Quinn dancing the sirtaki in the 1964 film of the same name, Georgios Zorbas was first a miner, then a monk in Greece, before becoming a mine owner in the Skopje region at the end of his life. Thus, the tomb of one of the great figures of Greek folklore is located here, south of the cemetery (GPS: 42.034575, 21.435675). Rediscovered in 1997, the grave is simple, white and bears the name of the Janda family (Јанда): it houses Georgios Zorbas (Георгиос Зорбас) but also his grandchildren Konstantinida and Jovan Janda, who died in the 1960s. In addition, the Butel cemetery has two important monuments. To the east stands the elegant Monument to the Victims of the 1963 Earthquake. Opened in 1973 and designed by Jordan Grabulovski, who designed the Makedonium in Kruševo, it hosts an official ceremony on July 26, the date of the earthquake that killed 1,070 people in Skopje in 1963. A little further south stands the large Partisan Monument (1964) designed by the Croatian architect Dimitrije Mita Mladenović (b. 1936). Two ceremonies are held here: on May 9 for the celebrations of the end of World War II and on March 11 in memory of the deportation of Macedonian Jews in 1943.

This World War I cemetery (Француски Воени Гробишта/Francuski Voeni Grobišta, Varrezat Ushtarake Franceze) is located above the Vardar and next to the US embassy. It houses the bodies of the soldiers of the French Army of the East who died during the Vardar offensive of September 1918. Although much smaller than Bitola, it contains 2,930 bodies of French, Moroccan and Senegalese soldiers: 960 individual graves and two ossuaries. Inaugurated in 1923, it stands on a former Roma cemetery ceded to France. Well-maintained, it comprises four rows of graves, monuments and the Maison du Souvenir (House of Remembrance). The House of Remembrance keeps a list of the soldiers buried here. An exhibition features period documents and recounts the capture of Skopje on September 29, 1918. This episode marked the end of the "Üsküb maneuver". While the Macedonian front had been at a standstill since 1915, this offensive, launched on September 14, 1918, broke through the lines held by the Bulgarians, Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Starting out from Florina (Greece), the^4th regiment of African chasseurs and the regiment of Moroccan spahis marched up the Vardar valley, giving rise to the last charge of the French cavalry under the command of General François Léon Jouinot-Gambetta, nephew of Léon Gambetta. The capture of Skopje led to Bulgaria's capitulation on September 30. Allied troops continued on to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which capitulated on November 4.

This cemetery (Еврејски Гробишта/Evrejski Grobišta) is marked by a large white Moorish-style portico built in the 1920s. It is the oldest Sephardic burial site in the Balkans. It houses around a thousand tombs, the oldest of which date back to 1497, five years after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Monastir/Bitola had up to 5,000 Sephardic inhabitants in the ^19th century. Almost the entire community (3,351 people) was massacred by the Germans in March 1943 at the Treblinka camp in Poland.