Gallery: Photos Recall Quake That Flattened Macedonia's Capital

...

The earthquake that struck the Macedonian capital of Skopje at 5.17am on July 26, 1963 - while most of its inhabitants were still sleeping - killed over 1,000 people and left more than half of the city's 200,000 residents homeless.

Entire families perished under collapsed buildings while the survivors woke to find their previously prosperous city a scene of devastation.

Despite the horrifying damage that it caused, the earthquake became a major turning point in the city's development.

The peoples of Yugoslavia - of which Macedonia was then part - and those of some 90 other countries provided generous aid after the disaster, after which Skopje was called "the City of Solidarity".

The disaster even brought together the then two bitter Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, whose armies both helped the recovery effort, working side by side in the rubble.

In the decades that followed, the city was rebuilt under the leadership of the Japanese Modernist architect Kenzo Tange.

"From an anonymous, marginal city, Skopje begun to rise from the dust of its ruined low-quality buildings. It turned into a recognizable centre of world solidarity, of leading urban design, modern architecture, contemporary art and earthquake engineering," Goran Markovski, Architecture professor at Skopje University, would recall.

Today, Skopje has more than 600,000 inhabitants who greatly benefit from the modern infrastructure created during the years of recovery.

The older generations, though, those who survived the earthquake, still feel nostalgic for the lost city of their youth that perished in a moment.