The city of Bitola (or Monastir as it was known during the Ottoman Empire) is in the south of North Macedonia, just a few kilometers away from the border with Greece. During the heyday of the Ottoman Empire, Monastir/Bitola was the cultural and diplomatic centre of the Balkans, hence its nickname as the City of Consuls. Other than a Greek consulate, the consuls are long gone and the grand neoclassical-style townhouses that line Bitola’s main drag that were once home to local aristocracy and wealthy merchants are now mostly decayed or derelict.

In the mid-15th century Sephardi Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal moved to Monastir at the invitation of the Ottoman sultan and by the beginning of the 20th Century, the city was home to a large, thriving Jewish community of some 11,000 people. As a consequence of the two Balkan wars and World War I, the Jewish population of Monastir dropped mostly due to emigration and by the time the city became Bitola following the creation of the new state of Yugoslavia there were little more than 3000 remaining.

Bulgaria sided with the Nazis and it was the Bulgarians who rounded up almost all of the region’s Jewish population - 3,276 men, women & children on March 11th, 1943 and shipped them off to Treblinka. None survived

Other than this memorial, and the hospital in the background named for Dr Haim Abravonel, a Jewish doctor who was spared deportation by the Nazis to help deal with a typhoid epidemic that had broken out, there are few signs in modern day Bitola of the once thriving Jewish community.

The massive Jewish cemetery dating back to the mid-15th Century is now mostly an empty hillside. Most of the gravestones are gone and attempts by Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University to create a memorial on the site have run into difficulties with the local municipality bureaucracy

On a lighter note, we do encounter a local Roma festival in the centre of Bitola, which I must admit made for a pleasant break while we had lunch