North Macedonia's history: three founding acts and three neighbours

Who ruled the Vardar valley before the Ottomans

Every neighbour that later argued over Macedonia found its case somewhere in the medieval record, which is why the early centuries are read as closely in Skopje as anywhere.

In antiquity most of the land that is now North Macedonia belonged to Paeonia, a kingdom of Thracian origin whose kings sat first at Bylazora on the Vardar and later at Stobi. Philip II of Macedon annexed Upper Macedonia and founded Heraclea Lyncestis near modern Bitola, and Paeonia was subject to him by 356 BC. Rome took the Scupi area under Domitian, and by the time of Diocletian the territory was split between Dardania and a province called Macedonia Salutaris, governed from Stobi. The name Skopje is Roman in origin, from Scupi.

Slavic tribes settled the region from the mid-sixth century. For the next seven hundred years it was contested between Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia, and each of those states left something a modern state would claim. Samuel, who reigned from 976 to 1014, set his capital at Ohrid and established a patriarchate there; Basil II brought the whole territory back under Byzantine rule in 1018 and reduced the patriarchate to the Archbishopric of Ohrid. Stefan Dušan of the Serbian Nemanjić dynasty was crowned emperor in Skopje in 1346. Parts of the west were held by the Albanian Gropa family between Ohrid and Debar, and in the fifteenth century Skanderbeg's campaigns reached as far as Ohrid and the Polog valley.

Britannica dates the competing modern claims to Macedonia to this period. Greeks and Albanians both base claims to indigenous status on the ancient Macedonian and Illyrian states, Bulgarians on Simeon I and Samuel, and Serbs on Dušan.

What the Ottoman centuries left in the towns

By the end of the fourteenth century the Ottoman Empire had taken the whole region, and it held it until 1912. Britannica calls this in many respects the most stable period of Macedonian history.

The empire moved people freely. Administrators, soldiers, merchants and artisans went where their work was, and where war, famine or disease emptied a district, settlers were brought in from elsewhere with no regard for any link between ethnicity and territory. Through the devşirme, Christian children were taken into the army and administration and converted to Islam. The towns became mixed, and they became more so in the nineteenth century as people tied to Ottoman rule moved into the lands the empire still held while Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria broke away.

The land itself changed hands in a slower way. The timar system, under which officeholders raised revenue in the sultan's name without owning the land, gave way after the eighteenth century to the çiftlik, large estates farmed commercially for their owners, on which peasants lost their traditional rights. That left a Christian peasantry bound to Turkish landlords, and the tobacco workers on those estates later formed a link with the Communist Party that outlasted the party's ban in Yugoslavia after 1921.

Administratively the territory was split. Rumelia Eyalet was abolished in 1867, and until 1912 the land that is now North Macedonia was divided between the vilayets of Manastir, Kosovo and Salonica, with Skopje and Bitola as provincial capitals. The churches divided it again: after the Bulgarian Exarchate was established in 1870, the bishoprics of Skopje, Debar, Bitola, Ohrid, Veles and Strumica voted to join it.

Why the Ilinden Uprising has two claimants

As the empire weakened, Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria each worked to win the population before the partition all three expected. They opened schools and churches to fix a language and a confession, argued over railway routes, lobbied the Porte and paid armed bands.

The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, IMRO, was founded in 1893 at Resen near Ohrid under the slogan "Macedonia for the Macedonians". On St Elijah's Day, 20 July by the old calendar and 2 August by the new, in 1903, it raised a revolt at Kruševo and proclaimed a republic there. The Ilinden Uprising was quickly crushed. The same year Krste Petkov Misirkov published On Macedonian Matters, the first attempt to set down a separate Macedonian literary language.

What the uprising meant is read differently on either side of the eastern border. In North Macedonia the Kruševo Republic is treated as the precursor of the state, its leaders are national heroes and its anniversary is the main national holiday. Gotse Delchev, the IMRO leader who died in 1903, is claimed as a national hero by both Macedonians and Bulgarians. Britannica records that he seems to have identified himself as a Bulgarian, and his remains have moved with the argument: buried in what is now northern Greece in 1903, reburied in Bulgaria during the First World War, and moved to Skopje in 1946. The Ottoman census of Hilmi Pasha in 1904, like most travellers of the period, classified the Slavic speakers of Macedonia as Bulgarians, and some scholars cited by Wikipedia caution that identities in the region were more fluid than a census category allows. This catalogue records both readings and adjudicates neither.

How the Balkan Wars divided Macedonia

In October 1912 Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria attacked the Ottoman Empire under a set of secret treaties and divided its remaining European lands. Bulgaria, dissatisfied with its share, tried to force a new partition in a second war, and the Treaty of Bucharest of August 1913 confirmed the boundaries that, with small changes, still divide the region. Serbia took the Vardar valley. Britannica puts the present republic at about two-fifths of the geographical region of Macedonia; the rest went to Greece and Bulgaria.

Under Serbian rule, and from 1918 inside the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the territory had no autonomy and was called South Serbia. Its Slavic speakers were treated as southern Serbs and their speech as a Serbian dialect. Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian schools were closed and non-Serbian teachers and priests expelled, and a colonisation programme settled Serbs on land taken from departed Ottoman landowners. When King Alexander renamed the state Yugoslavia in 1929, the territory became the Vardar Banovina, governed from Skopje. IMRO assassinated Alexander in France in 1934.

In 1941 the Axis divided Yugoslav Macedonia again. Bulgaria occupied most of it and the Albanian-populated west was joined to Italian-ruled Albania. Communist resistance grew from 1943, after Italy capitulated. The Mirče Acev Battalion was formed on Mount Slavej on 18 August 1943, the date now kept as the day of the army, and in November 1943 the second session of AVNOJ recognised the Macedonians as a separate nation for the first time. By Wikipedia's count the partisans went from 8,000 fighters in the summer of 1944 to 100,000 regular soldiers by April 1945.

How Yugoslavia made Macedonia a republic

The state was proclaimed on 2 August 1944, at the first session of the Anti-Fascist Assembly for the People's Liberation of Macedonia, ASNOM, held in secret at the Prohor Pčinjski Monastery inside the Bulgarian occupation zone. The monastery now stands in Serbia. The date was chosen because it was the anniversary of Ilinden, and it is kept today as Republic Day. The same session declared Macedonian an official language.

The alphabet was codified on 5 May 1945 by the Presidium of ASNOM, the orthography on 7 June 1945, and the first publishing house, Prosvetno Delo, opened on 16 April 1945. The dialect base chosen lay in the west-central triangle around Bitola, Prilep and Veles, the dialects most distinct from Bulgarian and Serbian, as Misirkov had proposed. In 1946 the territory became the People's Republic of Macedonia inside federal Yugoslavia, and in 1963 the Socialist Republic of Macedonia.

The Archbishopric of Ohrid was restored in 1958 and the Macedonian Orthodox Church declared itself autocephalous in 1967. Britannica judges that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia made that possible, and the other Orthodox churches refused to recognise it for more than half a century.

The same years brought purges, and their scale is disputed. People accused of pro-Bulgarian sympathies were purged, imprisoned and in some cases killed, including in the events known as Bloody Christmas in 1945. Bulgarian academic sources put the dead at about 1,200; the historian Zoran Todorovski counted 50,000 victims of all kinds, from killings to forced labour, a figure other Bulgarian researchers have questioned. In Greece, the civil war of 1946 to 1949 drove thousands of ethnic Macedonians north.

On 26 July 1963 an earthquake of magnitude 6.1 struck Skopje. It killed more than 1,070 people, left more than 200,000 homeless and destroyed about 80% of the city, and 78 countries sent money, teams or materials for the rebuilding.

Its economic development lagged behind the richer republics throughout the communist period. Britannica records that Macedonians stayed loyal to the federation all the same, because Yugoslavia was their guarantee against claims on their territory from outside and against secession from within.

Why independence opened a dispute over the name

The republic went to multi-party elections in November and December 1990. On 16 April 1991 its parliament removed the word "Socialist" from its name, and on 7 June the Republic of Macedonia was established under that name. In the referendum of 8 September 1991, 95.26% voted for independence, on a ballot that left open the right to join a future union of sovereign Yugoslav states. The sources disagree on the declaration that followed: Britannica dates it to 17 September 1991, Wikipedia to 25 September. The day celebrated is the referendum's. A new constitution was adopted on 17 November 1991.

Greece objected to the name at once. Its position was that Macedonia is a Greek region and heritage, that the republic had taken Greek symbols such as the sixteen-rayed sun on its 1992 flag and figures such as Alexander the Great, and that the name carried a territorial claim on northern Greece. The republic sought recognition under its constitutional name, and every name the Yugoslav republic had carried since 1944 contained the word Macedonia. Bulgaria was the first state to recognise the new country under its constitutional name.

The compromise was procedural. United Nations Security Council resolutions 817 and 845 of 1993 described a difference between the two states, and on 8 April 1993 the country joined the United Nations as "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", a reference other organisations then copied. Greece imposed a trade embargo in February 1994. It was lifted in 1995 after an Interim Accord signed in New York on 13 September, under which the republic replaced the sixteen-rayed sun on its flag, adopting the present eight-rayed design in October 1995, and changed clauses in its constitution that Greece read as a right to intervene abroad.

The name stayed open for another twenty-three years. The Kosovo War of 1999 brought 340,000 Albanian refugees into the country. At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, Greece vetoed an invitation over the name, and the government in Skopje answered with the programme Wikipedia calls "Antiquisation", which raised statues of Alexander, Philip II and Olympias in the capital.

How the Ohrid agreement rewrote the preamble

Between February and August 2001 ethnic Albanian insurgents calling themselves the National Liberation Army fought government forces in the north and west, around Tetovo, Kumanovo and the approaches to Skopje. They demanded constitutional recognition for Albanian language and rights. The Framework Agreement that ended the conflict was concluded at Ohrid and signed in Skopje on 13 August 2001 by President Boris Trajkovski and the leaders of the main Macedonian and Albanian parties. NATO's operation Essential Harvest, with 3,500 soldiers, collected the insurgents' weapons, and the National Liberation Army dissolved itself in September.

Any language spoken by at least 20% of the population became an official language alongside Macedonian, with the same threshold applied municipality by municipality. Laws on culture, language, education, documents and symbols now needed a majority that included a majority of the representatives from communities not in the majority. The state's description of itself changed as well.

The 1991 preamble had established Macedonia as a national state of the Macedonian people, in which equality as citizens was provided for Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Roma and other nationalities. The draft attached to the Ohrid agreement dropped every people by name and spoke only of the citizens of the Republic of Macedonia. What the Assembly adopted as Amendment IV named them all. The three founding references survived each version unchanged.

The new preamble can itself only be changed by a two-thirds vote that includes a majority of the representatives from the non-majority communities.

What Prespa settled and what Bulgaria reopened

The country applied to join the European Union in March 2004 and became a candidate on 17 December 2005, under the provisional reference, and Greece's objection held the process there. On 12 June 2018 the two governments announced an agreement, and on 17 June 2018 the foreign ministers Nikola Dimitrov and Nikos Kotzias signed it at Psarades, on the Greek shore of Lake Prespa.

The Prespa Agreement renamed the state the Republic of North Macedonia, for use erga omnes, at home and abroad. Its Article 7 settled the meaning of the words: applied to Greece, "Macedonia" and "Macedonian" denote its northern region and the Hellenic civilisation of that region; applied to North Macedonia, they denote its own territory, language and people, "with their own history, culture, and heritage, distinctly different". The language was recorded as South Slavic and as recognised by the UN conference on geographical names in Athens in 1977. Licence plates became NM or NMK, while the ISO codes MK and MKD stayed. The Vergina Sun was to leave public use, and a joint committee was set up to review school textbooks and maps.

Ratification was close on both sides. A consultative referendum on 30 September 2018 returned 91% in favour on a 37% turnout, short of the 50% the constitution requires. The Assembly passed the constitutional changes anyway on 11 January 2019 with 81 of 120 votes, the two-thirds needed, and the Greek parliament ratified on 25 January 2019 by 153 to 146. The agreement entered into force on 12 February 2019, NATO's members had signed the accession protocol on 6 February, and North Macedonia joined NATO on 27 March 2020.

The eastern question returned next. A friendship treaty with Bulgaria had been signed in August 2017. On 17 November 2020 Bulgaria refused to approve the European Union's negotiating framework, citing that treaty's implementation, minority claims and what it called historical negationism of Bulgarian identity in the region. A French proposal agreed in July 2022 opened accession talks the same month, on the condition that the constitution name Bulgarians among the country's peoples. That change needs two-thirds of the Assembly, and the governing coalition of the time could not assemble it. In 2022 the Macedonian Orthodox Church also restored relations with the Serbian Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and recognition by other churches followed, fifty-five years after it declared autocephaly.