North Macedonia's culture: saints of the alphabet and a standard of 1945

Why the holiday calendar honours teachers of writing

The Law on Holidays, published in 1998 and amended in 2007, fixes the days off, and each year the government issues a programme of non-working days under it. The programme for 2026 lists eleven days for every citizen. Two of them belong to the history of writing. The entry for 24 May reads "Saints Cyril and Methodius", with the gloss "Day of the All-Slavic Enlighteners", and because 24 May 2026 fell on a Sunday the Monday after it was taken off instead. The entry for 8 December reads "St Clement of Ohrid". Neither day is reserved for one faith or one community; the programme puts both in the list for all citizens, beside New Year, Ramazan Bajram and Independence Day.

Cyril and Methodius were the ninth-century missionaries to the Slavs. Britannica gives their achievement as an alphabet based on Greek letters and adapted to the sounds of the Slavonic tongue, which in its later development as Cyrillic came to unite several Slavic peoples. Clement worked at Ohrid itself. Britannica describes him as the first Slav bishop of Ohrid, a man who opened "the first Slavic school of higher learning", wrote "the earliest works of Slavic literature" and, with St Naum, translated the Scriptures from Greek into Slavonic. The monastery associated with him, St Panteleimon, dates from the ninth century. A later building on its foundations, the Imaret, was a Turkish mosque and inn.

UNESCO's statement for the Ohrid World Heritage property calls the Ohrid literary school "the first Slavonic University in the Balkans" and says it spread "writing, education and culture throughout the old Slavonic world".

Whose school it was is disputed. The Wikipedia account of the language places the Macedonian recension of Old Church Slavonic in the Bulgarian Empire, named for the works of the Ohrid Literary School. Samuel, who reigned from 976 to 1014, set up his capital and a patriarchate at Ohrid, and Britannica records that modern Bulgarians claim his state and Simeon's as giving them a special stake in Macedonia. North Macedonia keeps both saints' days as its own, and names its oldest university after Cyril and Methodius and its national library and the university at Bitola after Clement. This catalogue records both readings and settles neither.

What the Ohrid churches keep on their walls

The Ohrid region was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1979 for its nature and extended in 1980 to take in the town and its cultural area. In 2019 the property was extended again to cover the part of Lake Ohrid that lies in Albania, and it now runs to about 94,729 hectares. UNESCO's case for the cultural half rests on quantities: more than 2,500 square metres of frescoes and more than 800 Byzantine-style icons dating from the eleventh century to the end of the fourteenth.

Three churches carry most of the argument in UNESCO's text. St Sophia dates from the eleventh century, and Britannica gives its frescoes as eleventh to fourteenth century. The Holy Mother of God Perivleptos and St John Kaneo are the other two. St Clement's church, dated 1295, holds medieval frescoes that were uncovered only in the 1950s. Wikipedia counts more than thirty churches in Ohrid alone and describes several thousand square metres of fresco across the country, mainly from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, as the work of a Macedonian school of ecclesiastical painting. Britannica adds that icon painting and wood carving both have long histories in North Macedonia.

The UNESCO record is frank about repair. Conservation and restoration have been carried out on the religious buildings since the 1990s, the work has been researched and documented, and some of it has affected the property's authenticity. New materials have occasionally been used in reconstruction, and UNESCO lists that as a threat.

The church that worships in these buildings had its own problem of recognition. The Macedonian Orthodox Church declared autocephaly in 1967 and remained unrecognised by the other Orthodox churches until 2022, when it restored relations with the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In Skopje, work on a cathedral dedicated to St Clement began in 1972 and was completed in 1990. At the end of 2011 the country counted 1,842 churches and 580 mosques.

How the Macedonian standard was assembled after the war

Krste Petkov Misirkov published On Macedonian Matters in 1903 and proposed that a Macedonian literary language be built on the dialect of Prilep and Bitola. The proposal waited four decades. On 2 August 1944 the Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia declared Macedonian an official language, and Britannica records that the Yugoslav authorities chose the western dialects as its base in 1944 because they were the most distinct from Bulgarian and from Serbo-Croatian.

The base in practice was a triangle of west-central communities: Makedonski Brod, Kičevo, Demir Hisar, Bitola, Prilep and Veles. Linguists now distinguish 29 dialects of Macedonian, and the standard took its stress on the third syllable from the end from the western group.

The alphabet followed on 5 May 1945 and the orthography on 7 June 1945. The alphabet has 31 letters. Six of them are specific to Macedonian Cyrillic: ѓ, ќ, ѕ, џ, љ and њ. The last three came from the phonetic alphabet Vuk Karadžić had devised for Serbo-Croatian; ѕ has an equivalent in Church Slavonic; and Misirkov had already written љ and њ as л' and н'. The spelling is phonemic, one letter to one sound, summed up in a rule that asks for words to be written as they are spoken and read as they are written. The orthography manual first appeared in 1945 and was most recently revised in 2016.

The vocabulary was edited as deliberately as the letters. Words associated with the Serbian or Bulgarian standards were set aside in favour of words from native dialects and archaisms, on a principle of seeking native material first. Ottoman Turkish loanwords survived in speech and were pushed into the colloquial and ironic registers: комшија, from the Turkish for neighbour, gave way in formal writing to сосед.

The language remains contested from two directions. The government of Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Bulgarian academics widely consider Macedonian part of the Bulgarian dialect area, and in 1999 Sofia signed its first bilateral agreement written in Macedonian, a Joint Declaration in the official languages of both countries. Greece long objected to the name of the language. Under the Prespa agreement, signed in June 2018 and ratified by the Greek Parliament on 25 January 2019, the country's official language is the "Macedonian language", noted as belonging to the South Slavic group. In the 2002 census, 1,344,815 of 2,022,547 residents declared Macedonian their native language.

What writers produced once publishing opened

Before 1944 Macedonian writing had no recognised standard. Britannica notes that the Serbian rulers of the interwar kingdom refused to recognise Macedonian as a language, and that work towards a national literature continued in Misirkov's book, in the periodical Vardar, founded in 1905, and between the wars in the poetry of Kosta Racin.

After the Second World War, in Britannica's phrase, Macedonia was "freed to write and publish in its own language". The poets of that first generation were Aco Šopov, Slavko Janevski, Blaže Koneski and Gane Todorovski. Janevski also wrote the first Macedonian novel, Selo zad sedumte jaseni (The Village Beyond the Seven Ash Trees), in 1952, and then a cycle of six novels on Macedonian history. The theatre found its new dramatists in Kole Čašule, Tome Arsovski and Goran Stefanovski. Živko Čingo, Vlada Urošević and Jovan Pavlovski are the prose writers Britannica names.

The machinery was built at the same speed. Prosvetno Delo opened on 16 April 1945, three weeks before the alphabet was adopted. Nova Makedonija dates from 1944. Radio Skopje also began in 1944 and grew into Macedonian Radio Television.

The Struga Poetry Evenings, held each year in the lakeside town of Struga, gather poets from abroad and sit in the same stretch of shore as Clement's school.

How the performing arts and cinema were founded

How the concert hall and the stage were filled

The Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra was established in 1944, in the People's Republic of Macedonia. The National Opera opened in 1947, then under the name Macedonian Opera, with Cavalleria rusticana directed by Branko Pomorisac. Its annual May Opera Evenings run for around twenty nights in Skopje, and the first of them, in May 1972, staged Kiril Makedonski's Tsar Samuil. Samuel, its subject, is the ruler who set his capital at Ohrid.

Theatre was organised on the same post-war pattern. Wikipedia's account, whose figures come from the early 1990s, counts 13 professional theatres, including the Macedonian National Theatre with its drama, opera and ballet companies and the Theatre of the Nationalities with its Albanian and Turkish drama companies. In the 1993 to 1994 season they gave 1,596 performances to more than 330,000 people. A festival of professional theatres in Prilep is held in honour of Vojdan Černodrinski, whom Wikipedia calls the founder of modern Macedonian theatre, and Kočani hosts a yearly festival of amateur and experimental companies. Skopje has a jazz festival, and Ohrid a summer festival of classical music and drama.

Where the first films were shot

The start date of Macedonian film depends on the source. Wikipedia dates the first film made on the territory of the present country to 1895, by the Aromanian brothers Janaki and Milton Manaki in Bitola. Britannica places the Manakis' efforts in the early twentieth century. Both sources start the story with the Manaki brothers.

The first Macedonian feature film, Frosina, directed by Vojislav Nanović, came out in 1952, the same year as the first novel. The first colour feature, Miss Stone, followed in 1958, a story about a Protestant missionary in Ottoman Macedonia. Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain was nominated for the Academy Award for foreign-language film in 1994, and in 2020 the documentary Honeyland, directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov, was nominated in two categories at once: international feature and documentary feature. At home the comedy Bal-Can-Can was seen by more than 500,000 people in its first year.

Which communities keep their own letters and stages

The constitution gives the cultures that do not write in Macedonian their own institutions. Article 48 guarantees members of the nationalities the protection of their "ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity", the right to found institutions for culture and art, and instruction in their own language in primary and secondary schools. The 2002 census recorded 507,989 people declaring Albanian, 71,757 Turkish, 38,528 Romani, 24,773 Serbian, 8,560 Bosnian and 6,884 Aromanian.

The programme of non-working days turns that list into a calendar. Each community named in it has one day of its own. Albanians keep Albanian Alphabet Day on 22 November, Turks a day for teaching in the Turkish language on 21 December, Serbs St Sava on 27 January, Roma International Romani Day on 8 April, Vlachs their national day on 23 May, Bosniaks their international day on 28 September, and the Jewish community Yom Kippur. Two of the seven are days about how a language is written or taught. Albanian speakers in North Macedonia speak eastern varieties of Gheg, and Britannica records that since 1974 they have widely used a common orthography with Albania.

The Ottoman centuries are the other layer. Wikipedia lists Skopje's Old Bazaar, its covered market or Bezisten, the Kuršumli An caravanserai, the Daut Pasha Baths and the Mustapha Pasha Mosque, along with the Painted Mosque in Tetovo. The Daut Pasha Baths now hold an art gallery. Karagöz shadow theatre came to the Balkans with the Ottoman Empire, and the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi described performances of it in Skopje. It lasted in the region until the 1950s. The Sephardic Jewish community, which numbered about 7,200 on the eve of the Second World War, was almost destroyed in it: only 2% survived the Holocaust.

What UNESCO lists as living practice

North Macedonia ratified the convention on intangible heritage on 13 June 2006, and by 2024 six elements had been inscribed. The first was the Feast of the Holy Forty Martyrs in Štip, in 2013. Kopachkata, a dance from the village of Dramche in the Pijanec region, followed in 2014. In 2015 Glasoechko, a male two-part singing from Dolni Polog, went on the list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding. Two came in 2017: the cultural practices associated with the first of March, and Hıdrellez, the spring celebration. The traditional making and playing of the bagpipe, listed under the two names Gayda and Tulum, was added in 2024. A further nomination for urgent safeguarding, the ethnoastronomy or old celestial map of the Macedonian people, is marked on the UNESCO page for 2026.

UNESCO describes Kopachkata in detail. It is danced at weddings, public gatherings and religious holidays by the village's best male dancers, in a semicircle, to drums and a fiddle and sometimes a tamboura lute or bagpipes. The dancers hold each other's belts with crossed hands so that the line stays steady as the steps quicken, from a slow walk to short fast steps and stamping. The leader starts the dance, a dancer in the middle balances the two sides, and a newcomer learns by taking the last place and moving forward as he improves.

Outside the UNESCO list, Wikipedia names Folkfest in Valandovo, the Festival of Old Town Songs in Ohrid and the Ilinden Days of Folk Song in Bitola beside it. Britannica adds the Balkan Festival of Folk Songs and Dances in Ohrid and the pre-Lenten Carnival in Strumica. The rock group Leb i Sol built its reputation on setting folk themes and rhythms to a modern band.

What North Macedonia cooks and plays

Britannica traces the kitchen to Balkan and Mediterranean cooking flavoured by five centuries of Ottoman rule. Kebapčinja, grilled beef kebabs, and burek, a flaky pastry filled with cheese, meat or spinach, are of Turkish origin, and taratur, yogurt with shredded cucumber, and baklava are shared across the Balkans. The dishes Britannica calls Macedonian specialities are ajvar, a sauce of sweet red peppers; tavče gravče, baked beans; šopska salata of cucumber, onion and tomato under soft white cheese; and selsko meso, pork and mushrooms in brown gravy. Wikipedia names tavče gravče as the national dish and mastika as the national drink, with rakija as the common spirit.

Sport arrived through industry. Britannica records that football, basketball and volleyball spread after the Second World War, encouraged by large firms that fielded their own teams, and that winter sports grew in the 1970s with ski resorts in the Šar Mountains and near Mavrovo and Kruševo. Handball carries the club record: RK Vardar won the EHF Champions League in the 2016-17 and 2018-19 seasons, and Kometal Gjorče Petrov won the women's competition in 2002. The 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta were the first at which the country competed as an independent state, and Magomed Ibragimov's wrestling bronze in 2000 was its first medal. The men's football team reached its first major tournament at Euro 2020, played in 2021. Chess, Britannica adds, has a wide following.

Where antiquity went after the Prespa agreement

From 2006, and more intensively after the NATO summit of 2008, the government in Skopje pursued the policy Wikipedia calls "Antiquisation". Statues of Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon went up in several cities, and airports, highways and stadiums were renamed after them. Greece treated the programme as a provocation; it was also criticised inside the country and by EU diplomats, and it was partly reversed after 2016.

The Prespa agreement answered it in cultural terms. Article 7 records that the two parties understand the words "Macedonia" and "Macedonian" to refer to "a different historical context and cultural heritage". For Greece the words denote the Hellenic civilisation of its northern region from antiquity onward. For North Macedonia they denote its territory, language and people "with their own history, culture, and heritage", and the language and other attributes are declared "not related to the ancient Hellenic civilization". Article 8 then gave North Macedonia six months from entry into force to review monuments, public buildings and infrastructure that refer to ancient Hellenic history and to take corrective action. The government announced that the statues of Alexander, Philip II and Olympias raised under the Skopje 2014 programme would receive new inscriptions describing them as symbols of the Ancient Greek period and as "honouring Greek-Macedonian friendship".

In Greece, on 27 July 2022, the Centre for the Macedonian Language in Greece was registered as a non-governmental organisation, which Wikipedia describes as the first legal recognition of the Macedonian language in Greece since at least 1928.