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Paper short abstract

The Skopje City Museum, in the ruined former railway station, preserves traces of the 1963 earthquake. Using ethnography of the institution (archive, interviews, and exhibitions), this paper shows how the building’s ruination shapes memory.

Paper long abstract

The Skopje City Museum, housed in the former Central Railway Station, is the city’s major memory site of the 1963 Skopje earthquake. Deliberately preserved in a partially ruined state, the building bears visible traces of destruction, most notably its clock frozen at 5:17 a.m. - the moment the earthquake struck. The disaster claimed 1,070 lives and destroyed nearly two thirds of the city’s urban fabric. Today, however, the earthquake is remembered primarily through the international relief effort it mobilized at the height of the Cold War, earning Skopje the epithet “the City of Solidarity.” Drawing on ethnography of the institution, that is, research conducted at the museum's archive, interviews with museum affiliates and local residents, and an analysis of the institution’s annual exhibitions dedicated to the earthquake, this paper examines the role of the ruined building in shaping public memory of the disaster. It argues that ruination, both of the museum’s architectural fabric and of its immediate urban surroundings, functions not merely as a backdrop but as an active agent in the production, negotiation, and transformation of earthquake memory.