Gazoza: The Legendary Macedonian Pear Soda
If you know Italy or Turkey, you read the word gazoza with confidence: clear fizzy water. In a Macedonian supermarket, though, you'll find a fridge full of bottles chilling something golden orange, and the only things it shares with that Italian soda are the name and the bubbles.
Gazoza (Macedonian: Газоза) is a sweet sparkling soda with a pear flavor and a golden color, bottled in North Macedonia by a brewery in Prilep. It's the best-selling domestic soft drink in the country, drunk ice cold, straight from the bottle.
What Gazoza Means and Why the Macedonian One Is Different
The name is really a generic one: gazoza simply means "carbonated", from the word gas. It reached Greece and the Balkans from the Italian gassosa, and Turkey by a detour through the French eau gazeuse, so Greeks and Turks use the same word today, each from a different source. And everywhere else it describes a category, not a drink: Italian gassosa is clear and lemony (if it has a distant relative, it's chinotto), Turkish gazoz appeared at the end of the 19th century as a fizzy rival to the old şerbet, Greek gazoza is barely distinguishable from lemonade, and Albanian has the verb gazoj, to carbonate.
So the Macedonians didn't come up with the word - but the pear is theirs. Nowhere else in that belt from Italy to Turkey is gazoza golden and made with pear; here it's the only kind anyone knows by that name. For the record: they bottle a pear soda in Strumica too, under the name Strumka, but when a Macedonian says gazoza, they mean the one from Prilep.
Who Makes Gazoza, and Since When
Gazoza is made by Prilepska pivarnica, a brewery founded in 1924, one of the oldest in the Balkans and today a family business. You won't find out from the brewery's own chronicle exactly when it started bottling gazoza alongside beer - the beer gets milestones, gazoza just the phrase "for decades". What you will learn is that in 1979 and 1980 this brewery signed contracts to produce Pepsi and Mirinda for the whole of Yugoslavia and Albania; American cola for half the Balkans was bottled in Prilep, a few meters from the pear soda line. And gazoza paid it back a few decades later: the Macedonian press proudly noted that a plastic bottle reading Газоза in Cyrillic stands in the background of one scene in the American series Blacklist. Why the props team picked it, nobody knows.
What's in Gazoza and How to Drink It
There's no secret inside: water, sugar, carbon dioxide and pear flavoring, plus a coloring the maker swapped for a natural one to meet European rules. The label puts the sugar at 10.3 grams per 100 milliliters. Your body notices before your tongue does. The pear is easy to pick out and sweet the way fruit from a jar is sweet, not the way it is at a fruit market; the color looks like honey dissolved in water. It tastes closest to the thick fruit syrup you mix with water at home - except here it's already mixed, and mixed strong. People bake with it too: pogača or a marble cake "so gazoza" are common recipes where the soda gives the dough sugar, flavor and a few bubbles instead of baking powder.
It's drunk ice cold, most often from a half-liter PET bottle; families buy the 1.75-liter one. You'll find it in every supermarket, at gas stations and in kiosks next to the water and Skopsko beer; you just ask for a gazoza, nothing more. Before you reach for the big bottle, buy the half-liter: the way I see it, humanity splits into those who like it undiluted and everyone else, and until you know which side you're on, 1.75 liters is a very long commitment.
I bought my first gazoza at a supermarket in Skopje, in the Skopje City Mall - though you really can find it anywhere. The half-liter cost 32 MKD (0.50 EUR). The pear came through from the first sip, the sweetness a moment before that, and it stayed on my tongue long afterwards. Honestly: it was far too sweet for me, so I watered the rest of the bottle down about half and half and only then did it turn into a drink I finished with pleasure. That's not a complaint, more an admission: clearly it's a taste you can train yourself into. Locals have been drinking it undiluted for decades, after all.
Cheers!
