Skopje | |
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State | |
Country | |
Capital | |
Population | 668500 |
Skopje ( SKOP-yee, -yay, US also SKOHP-; Macedonian: Скопје [ˈskɔpjɛ] (listen); Albanian: Shkup) is the capital and largest city of North Macedonia. It is the country's political, cultural, economic, and academic centre.
The territory of Skopje has been inhabited since at least 4000 BC; remains of Neolithic settlements have been found within the old Kale Fortress that overlooks the modern city centre. Originally a Paeonian city, Scupi became the capital of Dardania in the second century BC. On the eve of the 1st century AD, the settlement was seized by the Romans and became a military camp. When the Roman Empire was divided into eastern and western halves in 395 AD, Scupi came under Byzantine rule from Constantinople. During much of the early medieval period, the town was contested between the Byzantines and the Bulgarian Empire, whose capital it was between 972 and 992.
From 1282, the town was part of the Serbian Empire, and acted as its capital city from 1346 to 1371. In 1392, Skopje was conquered by the Ottoman Turks, who called it Üsküb, with this name also being in use in English for a time. The town stayed under Ottoman control for over 500 years, serving as the capital of pashasanjak of Üsküp and later the Vilayet of Kosovo. In 1912, it was annexed by the Kingdom of Serbia during the Balkan Wars.
Almaty | |
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State | |
Country | Kazakhstan |
Capital | |
Population | 1475400 |
Postcode | 050013 |
Almaty (; Kazakh pronunciation: [ɑlmɑˈtə]; Cyrillic: Алматы), formerly known as Alma-Ata and Verny (Russian: Верный), is the largest city in Kazakhstan, with a population of about 2,000,000 people, about 11% of the country's total population, and more than 2.7 million in its built-up area that encompasses Talgar, Boraldai, Otegen Batyr and many other suburbs. It served as capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and later independent Kazakhstan from 1929 to 1997. In 1997, the government relocated the capital to Astana (renamed Nur-Sultan in 2019) in the north of the country.
Almaty is still the major commercial and cultural centre of Kazakhstan, as well as its most populous and most cosmopolitan city.