City
Stopis
Pustogradsko · Stobi
Listen to the story
Stopis is how the map spells Stobi, the ancient city whose ruins lie near Gradsko in North Macedonia, where the Crna flows into the Vardar. The spelling occurs nowhere else: perhaps a simple slip for Stobis, or perhaps an echo of the later Byzantine form Stypeion, popularly linked to a Greek word for tow or coarse flax. Once the capital of Paeonia, Stobi was, according to the Roman writer Pliny, a town of Roman citizens. Later it became a provincial capital and a bishop's seat, until Theoderic plundered it in AD 479.