Thursday, July 31, 2008

Bey House in Macedonia’s Tetovo to be Restored

Skopje’s National Conservation Centre began the restoration of the nineteenth-century Bey House in Tetovo, north-western Macedonia, which is to eventually become an ethnographic museum, national media reported recently.

The project, worth around 100,000 euro, will be carried out in several stages, the senior conservationist Tsvetanka Hadzhi-Petsova told the Macedonian daily newspaper Vest.

Earlier media reports noted that restoration plans plan to return the house back to its original form, including the reinstallation of its authentic Turkish bricks and the removal of all the walls and structures that were subsequently added onto it.

Mehmed Paloshi’s Bey House, built during the first half of the nineteenth century, dates from the final period of Ottoman rule of the region, which began around the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

According to Vest, the building, which has been protected as a cultural monument since 1950, has an area of 400 square metres. The ground level’s massive stone walls hold up a another floor, whose architectural and stylistic characteristics make it one of the most representative examples of the Ottoman secular architecture of the time not only in Tetovo, but in all of Macedonia.

After the restoration and conservation activities on the house are completed, which according to Hadzhi-Petsova is expected to happen in the next several years, the house will be turned into an ethnographic museum.

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