Popova Shapka

Popova Shapka (Popova Sapka) is a village in the Šar (Sharr) Mountains above Tetovo. It’s a ski resort, but we visited here in the summer of 2021 because Popova Shapka is an excellent base for hiking. For instance to the second highest mountain of Macedonia, Titov peak with its characteristic tower.

The village was very quiet and seems to be primarily used by people visiting their property in the weekend. We rented an entire house, villa Winterfell, through AirBnB and stayed for a week.

Cows were roaming freely through the village, acting as natural lawn mowers. In the evenings, shepherds came down the mountains with their sheep. There were also quite a lot of (in our experience harmless) stray dogs in the village, we heard that they go from house to house and usually get food from the villagers.

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During one of our walks one of the dogs, a big one from the Sharplaninac brand, joined us into the mountains (and got subsequently attached by shepherd  dogs when we encountered a flock of sheep. Luckily, only his pride was harmed).

It’s about a 30 minutes drive from Tetovo. As far as I know there are no shops in Popova Sapka, so plan your grocery shopping very well unless you enjoy driving back and forth to Tetovo all the time.

There’s a recently built Monastery dedicated to St Naum of Ohrid in Popova Shapka, which was closed.

Using Popova Shapka as base, we did hikes to the viewpoint Jelak (10 km), the Plat peak (28 km), Titov Peak (22 km) and visited the Leshnica waterfall (16.5 km) starting from the village Bozovce.