Religious places in Macedonia
Religious places in Macedonia can be found all over the country. Macedonia is a biblical region, mentioned in the Bible many times, as witnessed in the Acts of the Apostles, it was first preached and expanded by Apostle Paul in his missionary journeys. Some of the oldest Christian temples or medieval churches and monasteries in the world can be found in Macedonia. If you want to explore medieval churches and monasteries there are more than 1.000 of them. The frescoes in most of them are beautifully preserved surviving centuries. In many icon galleries around the country, you will find out more about medieval wooden icons, or even older early Christian terracotta icons. You can also visit the remains of some of the hundreds of early Christian churches with extraordinary floor mosaics. Visiting Macedonia, you will even find out about the prehistoric religious temples and observatories at the same time, like Kokino or Cocev Kamen.
In this story, the city of UNESCO – Ohrid takes a special place. In the Orthodox Christian world, Ohrid is called Jerusalem of the Balkans. According to the legend, the city in the past had 365 churches – one for each day of the year. Art historians are looking for hard evidence for that. In the 9th century, there was a university in this town. But rarely people are aware that the Cyrillic alphabet was invented exactly here in Ohrid in the same century, by the patron of Ohrid and the Macedonian Orthodox Church – Saint Clement of Ohrid.
