North Macedonia

From the heart of ancient Macedon to a young Balkan republic that had to win the right to its own name.

The Republic of North Macedonia occupies the northern, 'Vardar' part of the wider geographic region of Macedonia, a crossroads whose history has been layered, contested and shared. The land was the cradle of the ancient kingdom of Macedon, home of Philip II and Alexander the Great, though the relationship of the modern Slavic state to that classical heritage is itself disputed. Roman and then Byzantine rule gave way, from the sixth century, to Slavic settlement; in the early Middle Ages the region became the centre of Tsar Samuel's Bulgarian state, with its capital at Ohrid and a celebrated Slavonic literary school founded by Saints Clement and Naum. Five centuries of Ottoman rule ended only with the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, which partitioned Macedonia among Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria, the Vardar portion passing to Serbia and, after 1945, becoming a republic of Tito's Yugoslavia, where the Macedonian language and nation were codified. The country declared independence peacefully in 1991, but its path was blocked for decades by a dispute with Greece over its very name, settled only by the 2018 Prespa Agreement, which renamed it the Republic of North Macedonia and opened the door to NATO membership in 2020. A 2001 ethnic Albanian insurgency was ended by the Ohrid Framework Agreement, and a continuing identity dispute with Bulgaria still complicates its bid to join the European Union.