Skopje's Sedmica Sandwich Shop Is Being Torn Down After 30 Years - and the Municipality Stays Silent on the Permit

Another piece of old Skopje is disappearing. The well-known „Sedmica" sandwich shop, across from the Greek embassy on Borka Taleski Street, is being torn down - to make room for a building. For the past few days, machinery has been demolishing the house that held the shop for thirty years. The site is fenced off with boards, and all that's left of the sandwich shop is rubble and memories.

For many people in Skopje, „Sedmica" wasn't just a place to eat - it was one of those fixed points of the city that stay the same while everything around them changes. Thirty years is long enough for several generations to have passed through. When a place like this vanishes, you don't just lose one shop; you lose a small piece of the city's everyday landscape, the kind that's written down nowhere but that everyone knows.

In its place, according to the „Buњakovec 1" detailed urban plan, the investor is planning a building with a ground floor, four storeys and an attic. A standard construction story for central Skopje - a house comes down, a building goes up, the city gets denser. Whether that part of the centre even needs it, and what the new construction will look like, stays, as usual, without a clear answer.

And then there's the uncomfortable part. The Centar municipality did not answer the question about the building permit, and the investor's identity remains unknown. When public space in the city centre changes and the institution stays silent on the details, it opens up exactly the suspicions that silence usually wants to avoid. Who is building, what they are building and under whose permit - these are not secrets to be kept from citizens. Or at least they shouldn't be.