Roman North Macedonia

Two Roman provinces met in what is now North Macedonia. The south belonged to Macedonia, which Rome conquered in 168 BC and made a province in 146 BC. The north, around Skopje, lay in Moesia and later in the province of Dardania. Across the south ran the Via Egnatia, the road the Romans built in the 2nd century BC from Dyrrachium on the Adriatic, through the highlands around Lake Ohrid, to Thessalonica and on to Byzantium.

Heraclea Lyncestis, 2 km south of Bitola, was a waypoint on that road and, in the early Christian period, an important bishop’s seat; it was abandoned gradually in the 6th century after an earthquake and Slavic invasions. Stobi, near Gradsko, stands where the Crna joins the Vardar, on the main road from the Danube to the Aegean, and ended as the capital of the late Roman province of Macedonia Salutaris.

In the north, Scupi began as a Roman military camp on the site of a Dardanian settlement, became a colony of veteran legionaries and was abandoned in AD 518 after an earthquake; its ruins lie a few kilometres from the centre of Skopje. To the east, Bargala was a city of Macedonia Secunda whose gate, by its own inscription, was built in 371/372. In the 4th and 5th centuries it was a bishop’s seat, and excavations since 1966 have uncovered its walls, seven towers and two gates.

Each page below says what is visible at the site today, whether it is worth the trip, and how to get there.