Despite the extensive use of modern construction materials, old masonry buildings, characterized by high consumption of energy and a high risk of partial or complete destruction during earthquakes, still represent a great majority of both residential and public building stock in many earthquake-prone countries, such as the countries in the Balkan region. Improvement of seismic resistance and energy efficiency of these buildings is very important and actual topic worldwide. The delicate problem of proving the effectiveness of the selected consolidation, retrofitting or strengthening system can be successfully overcome by using the methodology of design assisted by testing, which as methodology, has been codified in all Eurocodes.

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Following the M=6.4 earthquake that hit Durres in Albania on 26.11.2019, at the request of the Government of the Republic of Albania to the Government of R.N. Macedonia, in coordination with the deputy Prime Minister of the Government of R. N. Macedonia and the Director of the Bureau for Forensic Expertise of the R. N. Macedonia as operational coordinator, teams of experts were established for assistance and support to the local teams in rapid assessment on the structural safety of damaged buildings in the most affected areas. The Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology -IZIIS (Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje) was leading the Macedonian mission with four teams composed of 11 experts. Most of the structures that were the subject of inspection were residential, mainly constructed as reinforced concrete structure and flat-slab systems prior the year 2000. Most of these structures suffered major nonstructural damage with negligible structural damages and extensive repairable structural damages. The cause of incurred damages was inconsistent application of recent knowledge in design, construction, and control of earthquake resistant structures. In order to define corresponding technical solutions for repair and strengthening, especially for the vital structures, it is necessary to take additional measures as detailed engineering inspection and science-based analysis.

Within the frame of the EU FP6 PROHITECH project a methodology for seismic retrofitting of monuments using CFRP elements has been developed and experimentally verified by shaking table tests on a model of the Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Skopje. The resulted efficiency of the applied methodology was crucial and starting point in making the decision about the concept of seismic upgrading of the real monument. Namely, the retrofitting methodology using CFRP was applied for the first time on the structure of Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Skopje in the period 2007-2010. The authors of this paper had the opportunity and the challenge to design and supervised the application of the seismic retrofitting methodology, followed by all the necessary solutions for in-situ technical detailing. Following this successful story, the same or slightly modified retrofitting methodology has been implemented in several other mosques on the territory of North Macedonia and Kosovo. The paper presents the main points of the specific process of pre-investigation, analysis, design of retrofitting and its application in the abovementioned case studies.

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