Map - Šuto Orizari Municipality (Šuto Orizari)

Šuto Orizari Municipality (Šuto Orizari)
Šuto Orizari (Balkan Romani: Shuto Orizari; Shutkë), often shortened as Šutka (Шутка), is one of the ten municipalities that make up the City of Skopje, the capital of the Republic of North Macedonia. Šuto Orizari is also the name of the urban neighbourhood where the municipal seat is located. It consists of a council and mayor.

Šuto Orizari covers 7.48 km² and had 17,357 inhabitants in 2002. It is the second smallest municipality of Skopje behind Čair and the least populated. Created ex-nihilo after the 1963 Skopje earthquake to relocate Romani people in North Macedonia who had lost their house, Šuto Orizari remains the only municipality in North Macedonia with a Muslim Romani people majority. In 2002, they represented almost 80% of the population, which also included small numbers of Albanians in North Macedonia and ethnic Macedonians. Šuto Orizari is the only local administrative unit in the world to have adopted Balkan Romani as an official language.

For much of its history, Šuto Orizari was a small village in the country, as were neighbouring Butel and Vizbegovo. Its name derives from orizar (оризар), the Macedonian word for paddy field. It is only after the 1963 Skopje earthquake that the area became urbanised. Through the 20th century, Skopje had greatly expanded: while it had only 41,000 inhabitants in 1921, it had reached 166,870 in 1961. As a result, the area around Šuto Orizari was slowly becoming part of the city.

Before the earthquake, most of Skopje's Romani people in North Macedonia community lived in areas close to the Old Bazaar. The largest one is Topaana, located close to the fortress and home to Roma people since at least the 14th century. Built in cheap materials, Topaana and the other Roma settlements were severely damaged by the earthquake which destroyed around 80% of the whole city.

Thanks to international aid, the reconstruction started quickly after the earthquake. Local authorities took the opportunity to rebuild Skopje as a functional and modern city, privileging large blocks of flats and dividing Skopje into areas dedicated to specific uses. As they also had to build new accommodation for the large Roma minority, they first considered the reconstruction as a way to assimilate them and resolve unemployment and sanitary problems that concerned that population.

Most of the Muslim Roma population refused to live in the new buildings and authorities eventually decided to give them a specific neighbourhood where they could build the houses they wished. The first buildings to appear were iron shacks donated by the United States. They were planned for temporary use, but some still remain more than 40 years after the earthquake. Most of the Muslim Romani community of Šutka is still facing unemployment and hard living conditions, although some of them manage to build large houses with the money they get as seasonal workers in Western Europe. The Roma houses in Šutka are built with solid materials and have fenced gardens. The area does not give the same impression of marginality as do older Romani neighbourhoods such as Topaana.

Šuto Orizari became a distinct municipality in 1996.

 
Map - Šuto Orizari Municipality (Šuto Orizari)
Country - Republic_of_Macedonia
North Macedonia, officially the Republic of North Macedonia, is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe. It shares land borders with Kosovo to the northwest, Serbia to the north, Bulgaria to the east, Greece to the south, and Albania to the west. It constitutes approximately the northern third of the larger geographical region of Macedonia. Skopje, the capital and largest city, is home to a quarter of the country's 1.83 million people. The majority of the residents are ethnic Macedonians, a South Slavic people. Albanians form a significant minority at around 25%, followed by Turks, Romani, Serbs, Bosniaks, Aromanians and a few other minorities.

The region's history begins with the kingdom of Paeonia, a mixed Thraco-Illyrian polity. In the late sixth century BC, the area was subjugated by the Persian Achaemenid Empire, then incorporated into the Kingdom of Macedonia in the fourth century BC. The Roman Republic conquered the region in the second century BC and made it part of the larger province of Macedonia. The area remained part of the Byzantine Empire, but was often raided and settled by Slavic tribes beginning in the sixth century of the Christian era. Following centuries of contention between the Bulgarian, Byzantine, and Serbian Empires, it was part of the Ottoman Empire from the mid-14th until the early 20th century, when, following the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, the modern territory of North Macedonia came under Serbian rule.
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MKD Macedonian denar ден 2
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