Monuments to visit Bitola

This large cultural center (Центар за Култура/Centar za Kultura) is home to the Manaki Brothers International Film Festival every year in late September or early October. The rest of the year, exhibitions, plays and film screenings take place here. The building was designed by two influential Yugoslav architects, the Slovenian Marko Mušič (b. 1941) and the Macedonian Aleksandar Smilevski (b. 1939), who are also responsible for important buildings in Skopje.

This elegant white villa (Офицерски Дом/Ofitserski Dom) has housed the tourist office since 2022. It was built for the Ottoman governor from 1911 and completed in 1919, when the town had already passed into Serbian control. Used as a military officers' club until the 2000s, it was restored in 2021. The house is surrounded by the Macedonian Phalanx Park, which pays tribute to the troops of Alexander the Great. At the entrance stands the beautiful statue of partisan Stevan Naumov (1920-1942) in the socialist realist style.

This vast 65 m-long building (Безистен/Bezisten) is one of the city's oldest Ottoman edifices, having probably been built in the late ^15th century. It is a bezistan (from the Persian bazzāzestān, "place of the drapers") where merchants' most precious goods were stored for the night: silks, gold, jewelry, etc. Renovated in Baroque style in the ^19th century, it is now a little dilapidated but houses a number of shops and services. On the south side is the pleasant terrace of Café Vezilka.

Located in a park, this 32 m-high tower (Саат-Кула/Saat-Kula) was erected around 1830 to replace a ^16th-century tower. Originally used to indicate prayer times to Muslim inhabitants, it was fitted with a classical clock in 1912, then a Christian cross at its top in 1991. Next to it is a plaque in honor of Swiss Gustave Moynier (1826-1910), president of the International Red Cross and founder of the Bitola Red Cross Committee.