As of June 20, 2011 booming Hungarian airline Wizzair will become the first low cost carrier to fly to the Macedonian capital, running three flights a week from the utilitarian low cost Mecca of London Luton. Wizz CEO, Josef Varadi, told Utrinski Vesnik newspaper that they're also considering runs between Skopje and Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam and Barcelona.

With fares starting at £26.99 (31.95 euros) and construction underway on another terminal at Skopje Alexander the Great Airport, as well as renovations at Ohrid's St. Paul the Apostle Airport, the often overlooked Balkan nation is set to explode onto tourist itineraries.

Skopje Alexander the Great, run by Turkish operator TAV Airport Holdings since the long, slow death of MAT Macedonian Airlines which was banned from airports for millions of euros of unpaid fees and finally spasm into bankruptcy last January, has had its runway extended by 500 metres to deal with long-haul flights – making the airport bigger than both Belgrade Nikola Tesla and Sofia. With the improvements completed by October 2011, TAV hopes the to turn Skopje into a hub for returning members of the Turkish expat community and entice Turkish Airlines into setting up a base there.

Alp Er Tunga Ersoy, the Deputy Manager of TAV in Macedonia, told Southeast European Times, "Our goal is to make Skopje a popular regional hub by using its advantageous geographical location. Thanks to this investment, Macedonia will have state of the art airport facilities and Skopje's Alexander the Great Airport will be one of the main drivers of economic growth in the region.”

Critics remain, er, critical, but whatever the end result, it certainly bodes well for regular travellers to Southeast Europe - at least until TAV goes bankrupt as well.

Skopje's plans to build a museum in the grounds of the Macedonian capital's Kale fortress has been halted mid-construction following complaints about its overt Christianity and demands of a Muslim equivalent.

The museum was to be built in the style of a medieval church over the foundations of a recently excavated 14th-century Orthodox church and although authorities claim it'll be entirely secular and devoted to architectural finds from the site, Macedonia's biggest Albanian party, the Democratic Union for Integration, has cried foul and demanded a mosque built adjacent.

"Our message is that Albanians also contribute to and have responsibility for the creation of cultural traditions in Macedonia," protested Izet Mexhiti, the DUI mayor of the Skopje municipality of Cair, to Balkan Insight.

Originally built in the 6th Century and reconstructed in the reign of the Emperor Justinian I in 10th and 11th Centuries, Kale fortress has been the source of some of the Balkan's most impressive archaeological finds, from woodwind instruments believed to pre-date the construction of the fortress by an incredible 3,000 years, to more recent, though no less impressive, haul of Byzantine coins.

Would it have killed anyone to talk about this before they cracked on with the construction, and come to some sort of solution without the seemingly inevitable factitious arm wrestle?

As long as politics and lack of dialogue between communities keeps Macedonia's fantastic history in storage, the victims won't be either one group or the other, it'll be both. Not only does Macedonia need to strengthen the shared culture that binds it, it needs a culture of adoration for its ancient sites and cultural heritage to rival (and doubtless, irritate!) its Greek neighbour, and lures in tourists by the coachload.

Britain's biggest low cost air carrier Easyjet has completely ruled out the possibility of flights to Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite earlier breathlessly reported claims to the contrary according to the Macedonian International News Agency. The airline currently flies to Slovenia, Croatia and, bizarrely, given their reluctance to fly to what might be lazily considered the 'shadier' Balkan counties, Pristina in Kosovo.