Zelen Pazar: Skopje's Market for an Ordinary Day
He was sitting on a cardboard box in front of a weathered wall, bundles of grape leaves, rosemary and a bucket of gooseberries all around him, and when I asked whether I could take his photo, he gave me two thumbs up. Then he told me he had served in Czechoslovakia, and he praised it at length, at great length. That is how a morning starts in a place where the city comes to shop, not the tourists.
Zelen pazar (Macedonian: Зелен пазар) is a food market in the center of Skopje on Kočo Racin Boulevard, where the stalls under the roofs and the sidewalks around them sell everything Macedonian cooking is built on: vegetables, fruit, cheeses and kajmak, beans, herbs and sweets by weight.
What Zelen pazar Means and How It Differs From Bit pazar
The name is a plain description of the goods: zelen is the short Macedonian form of the adjective green, pazar is market, so a green market - named not for the color of the stalls but for the vegetables that dominate it. The same two words also cover this type of market anywhere in Macedonia; Ohrid has its own zelen pazar too. In Skopje the markets are run by a single company, Skopski pazar, which has more than ten of them around the city, and this is the only one simply called the Green Market, as if there had been no time left for a name of its own in the year it opened.
A tourist who goes looking for a market in Skopje usually ends up at Bit pazar instead: it sits by the northern gate of the Old Čaršija, Skopje's historic Ottoman-era bazaar quarter, it is the biggest market in the country, it grew out of a medieval fair, and alongside the peppers it sells textiles and shoes - and yes, for me it is too touristy and far less appealing than this one. Zelen pazar is its younger sibling, the one that feeds the neighborhoods around the center: groceries, almost no souvenirs.
What Zelen pazar Sells and for How Much
The price tags here are handwritten and never say the unit, because everyone knows it is per kilo. Tomatoes called rozev domat, a popular local variety, went for 80 MKD (1.30 EUR), apricots for 100 MKD (1.70 EUR), a pile of cherries with the stems still on for 120 MKD (2 EUR), and next to them lay strawberries and peas in the pod. Macedonian newspapers measure the gap between the markets and the supermarkets every spring, and in May 2025 they found that cherries cost 70 denars a kilo at the green markets and several times that in a supermarket.
Herb Sellers on Cardboard
The vegetables get stalls. The herbs get the sidewalk. In front of the market and along the walls, people sit on stools and crates with whatever they picked or grew spread out on cardboard in front of them: bundles of freshly picked mountain tea, which you otherwise only ever see dried, chamomile, parsley, mint seedlings and elderflower in a plastic bag, the kind you take home for syrup. The sidewalk officially has nothing to do with the market and the city sends an inspector through now and then; whoever sits by the entrance today may not be sitting there tomorrow. Among the herbs you also find what will be food six months from now: pepper seedlings labeled ajvarka, the variety the whole country cooks into ajvar in the fall, and grape leaves rolled up in a plastic bag and tied with string, ready for sarma. Anyone who has been to a Saturday market in a small country town's main square back home knows how this works - they just have to picture five herb sellers instead of one, no price tags, and a price you only hear once you ask.
Kajmak, Sweets and Clay Tavas
Everything that needs to stay cold sits under the roof of the stalls. Kajmak, the thick creamy layer skimmed off boiled milk, sits here in slabs in plastic tubs, and the sign on it reads kraljevački - after the Serbian town of Kraljevo, which is to kajmak what Parma is to ham. A little further on there is a counter with baklava, tulumbas and coconut balls at 250 MKD (4.10 EUR) a kilo, and next to it a stall with clay cookware: the oval tavas that tavče gravče is baked in, jugs and lidded pots for 400 to 900 MKD (6.60 to 14.90 EUR), a craft kept alive in Macedonia by the potters of Veles. Anyone who turns up hungry will find a snack bar by the market with a list of čorbas on the wall: tavče gravče goes for 100 MKD (1.70 EUR) a portion, tripe škembe čorba for 160 MKD (2.70 EUR).
A Morning Among the Stalls
I walked to Zelen pazar (see Where to Eat in Skopje) from the center in the morning and bought almost nothing apart from a heap of peas; I just did not feel like hauling groceries around all day. Local markets are my favorite places in any city, and I go for the people. The woman with the sweets straightened up behind her counter and posed with such pride that the baklava might have been her portrait, the man with the medicinal herbs held on to his cap and kept the cigarette in his hand, and the man from the start of this piece really would not hear a word against Czechoslovakia.
Zelen pazar
