STIP

Stip Stip is significant cultural, educational and economical centre in Eastern Macedonia, that lies at an altitude of 300m above sea level. It is a town of the textile, and fashion industries. There are several churches (the nineteenth-century St Bogorodica has a lovely iconostasis) and the remains of a mosque, that was a church (St. Ilija).
There is a large Turkish konak (formerly a pasha's house), which has been turned into a little museum. On the ground floor you will find some Roman remains; upstairs a small ethnographic section which includes eight interesting costumes from nearby villages, a room mocked up as a Turkish apartment, and another room devoted to frescoes from the Vodoca monastery. Stip There is one particularly interesting painting of a medieval saint. In the main street beside the River Bregalnica, there is a daily fruit and vegetable market; where on Friday's, (the weekly marked day), the town is filled with local Villagers - an occasion worth seeing. To the south-west, on the big hill which shadows the town, you can see the remains of a medieval castle (it's worth climbing up for the view), and half-way up, on what is little more than a ledge, the small fourteenth-century church of St Arangel.
In the church of the Holy Virgin in Novo Selo near Stip there is a permanent exhibition of icons. In the yard of this church there is a school where at the end of the 19th century Goce Delcev, ideologist of the Macedonian national liberation movement, was a teacher.
Apart from the fact that some of the best rice and tobacco in the Balkans is grown around Stip the town has another claim to fame. It was here, in the early thirties, that the last pair of working camels in Europe died.
Also in the surroundings of Stip it is to be found the Kezovica spa.

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