Travel Guide Šuto Orizari

Welcome to the world's largest Roma city! No one knows how many inhabitants there actually are, but the figure is somewhere between 40,000 and 120,000. One thing is certain: there are far more Roma here than the official statistics suggest. Šuto Orizari, or Šutka as the Skopians call it, is in any case the only town in the world where the mayor is a Roma, the only one where Romani is the first official language and the only one where, on a town hall, flies the international Roma flag with its sixteen-spoked red wheel evoking the Indian and nomadic origins of this people. It was after the 1963 earthquake that Skopje's Roma population concentrated here, in a former rice field(Orizari comes from there). For a long time, it was a shantytown, where Emir Kusturica filmed Time of the Gypsies, released in 1988. Today, it's a city of very different neighborhoods, often with beautiful houses built with money from the diaspora working in the four corners of the European Union. In any case, it's a rather welcoming place for tourists. While tourists remain rare, Skopians flock to Šutka for its colorful, low-priced market.