Travel Guide Bitola

The country's second most populous city after Skopje, Bitola is a pleasant town with mosques and churches, old sharia and beautiful neoclassical houses, not to mention the nearby Pelister National Park. Nicknamed "the city of consuls", the former Monastir has lost much of its aura. Now predominantly Slavic, but once multi-ethnic, it missed out on becoming the capital of the young Republic in 1945. Bitola has played an important role throughout history. It was here that Philip II founded one of the few Macedonian cities of antiquity. It was disputed between the Bulgarians and Byzantines in the Middle Ages, then became a refuge for thousands of Jews expelled from Spain under the Ottomans, then one of the main centers of the Young Turk movement in the early 20th century, before becoming the "Verdun of the Balkans" during the First World War, as witnessed by Bitola's vast and moving French cemetery.