Stone Dolls of Macedonia

By Linda Tancs

In the village of Kuklica in Macedonia is an area consisting of over 120 naturally formed stone pillars on the right bank of the Kriva River valley. Legend has it that the stone community formed from the curse of a bride as she watched her bigamous groom marry another woman. Of course, legend tends to have more appeal than fact. The real cause of the stone formations is erosion occurring over the past 100,000 years of the current geological epoch, a process creating pillars due to differences in erodibility of the area’s volcanic rocks. The village is about an hour away from the capital city of Skopje.