Skopje's amusement park is back on paper: the 10-million-euro contract is cancelled, and the City will install rides bought back under Trajanovski

Last December, Mayor Orce Gjorgjievski promised Skopje "an ultra-modern amusement park, one of the best in the region" - with roller coasters, water attractions and virtual reality zones, after "long years of delays and false promises". In May, the City signed a contract worth 10 million euros with the company Mastef. By mid-August the contract had already been cancelled. Skopje residents found out from the media, not from the mayor.

The explanation: rides the City has to pay for

Gjorgjievski now says the contract was terminated by mutual agreement because of a court ruling. The company from the time of former mayor Koce Trajanovski, whose ride contract the City had cancelled, sued and won - so the City of Skopje has to pay for those rides. According to the City, the ruling came after the new contract had already been signed, and the new tender also included rides that had already been bought. "So as not to duplicate them and waste money, we decided to terminate the contract by mutual agreement," the mayor says.

Sounds reasonable - until you ask how the City put out a 10-million-euro tender without knowing there was a court case over rides it already owned. The seven slides and attractions from the Trajanovski era, according to reports published in recent days, sat in warehouses for years, and storage fees were being paid for them too.

A project that outlived every mayor

The old amusement park ran from 1973 to 2017. Trajanovski bought rides and planned 27 attractions. Petre Šilegov halted that project, and in 2019 the Italian studio Bassa donated a study for a new amusement park for around 3,000 visitors a day - which ended up in a drawer because of the pandemic. Under Danela Arsovska the project didn't move. Six months ago Gjorgjievski demolished the summer nightclubs in the City Park to free up space. Skopje has been without an amusement park for almost a decade.

The new plan: installation of the seven old rides starts within a month, and a new tender will buy a roller coaster, a Ferris wheel and a few more attractions, so the new contract costs less than 10 million euros. The deadline stays at the end of 2027, "as I promised in my programme", says Gjorgjievski.

Generations of Skopje kids have grown up hearing about the amusement park that was coming. If installation really starts within a month, it will be the first visible step in many years. If it doesn't, Skopje residents will have every right to ask how much money has gone on tenders, storage fees and court cases for a park nobody has ever ridden in.