Macedonia, region in the south-central Balkans that comprises north-central Greece, southwestern Bulgaria, and the independent Republic of North Macedonia.
The traditional boundaries of the geographical region of Macedonia are the lower Néstos (Mesta in Bulgaria) River and the Rhodope Mountains on the east; the Skopska Crna Gora and Šar mountains, bordering southern Serbia, on the north; the Korab range and Lakes Ohrid and Prespa on the west; and the Pindus Mountains and the Aliákmon River on the south. Including the Chalcidice Peninsula, this stretch of land covers about 25,900 square miles (67,100 square km). About 50 percent of the region lies in Greece, with its centre at the port of Thessaloníki, and 10 percent lies in Bulgaria, with its centre at Blagoevgrad. The Republic of North Macedonia, with its capital at Skopje, occupies the rest.
The region of Macedonia ranges from the high plateaus and mountain peaks of Bulgaria and the North Macedonian republic to the wide, flat floodplains of the lower Axiós (Vardar) and Strimón (Struma) rivers in Greece. Since ancient times, Macedonia has served as a strategic crossroads linking the Adriatic and the Bosporus, as well as the Aegean, with the Danube. The leaders of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, both based in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), considered Macedonia an essential part of their realm. When the national consciousness of the Balkan peoples began to develop, the European great powers, who had their own foreign policy agendas to advance, were not primarily concerned with drawing international boundaries in a manner that would result in states with ethnically homogeneous populations (even if it had been possible). As a result, the Macedonian Question—the conflict over the territory and the national loyalties of the heterogeneous population of the region—developed into a problem of international magnitude that continues to undermine the goal of peace and stability in the Balkans.
The region of Macedonia owes its name to the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, which was centred in the southern part of the area. By the 4th century bce it had extended its rule northward into the Balkan Peninsula and throughout the Mediterranean. In the 2nd century bce Macedonia became a Roman province. When the Roman Empire was divided into eastern and western halves in the 4th century ce, Macedonia became part of the eastern half, which came to be known as the Byzantine Empire. By that time the population of Macedonia had been largely Christianized.
The ethnic composition of the region was dramatically changed by the invasion of Slavic peoples into the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries ce. In the 9th century most of the region fell under the sway of the first Bulgarian empire. The Bulgarians were Christianized during this period by disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius, whose adaptation of Greek characters to a Slavonic dialect spoken in southern Macedonia eventually became the Cyrillic alphabet. For the rest of the Middle Ages, parts of the region were variously ruled by the Byzantine Empire, the second Bulgarian empire, and the Serbian empire. The groundwork was thus laid for the conflicting national claims to Macedonia that emerged in the modern era. Macedonia fell under the sway of the Ottoman Empire in the late 14th century, and the area was subsequently colonized by significant numbers of Muslim Turks and Albanians, thus further complicating the region’s ethnic fabric. In the late 15th century, sizable numbers of Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain settled in the towns of Macedonia (especially Thessaloníki), where they competed with the Greeks for local trade.
In 1878, after winning the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, Russia, through the Treaty of San Stefano, forced the Ottomans to grant independence to Bulgaria. For the next three decades Macedonia was the target of Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian expansion, each claiming closer ethnic or historical ties to the region than the others. In 1893 the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) was founded to support the cause of Macedonian independence. In 1903 IMRO led the Ilinden, or St. Elijah’s Day, Uprising, but it was rapidly and brutally expunged by Ottoman authorities. Between 1903 and 1908, in a conflict that came to be known as the “Macedonian Struggle,” the three Balkan states used teachers, priests, and guerrilla fighters to lay claim to the land and people of Macedonia.
In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece put aside their differences and formed the Balkan League in an attempt to take control of the region from the Turks. They promptly achieved this goal in the First Balkan War (1912–13) but then quarreled among themselves over how to divide Macedonia. The Serbs and Greeks joined forces and defeated Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War (1913). The ensuing treaty in 1913 assigned the southern half of the region to Greece, most of the northern half to Serbia (later part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), and a much smaller portion to Bulgaria.
Between 1912 and 1923 several population exchanges took place in Macedonia. The largest of these occurred under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), when 375,000 Muslims left Greek Macedonia for Turkey and were replaced by 640,000 Christian refugees from Turkey. When the Balkan Peninsula was overrun and partitioned by the Axis powers during World War II, Bulgaria occupied all of Macedonia except for Thessaloníki, which was occupied by the Germans, who sent four-fifths of the city’s Jews to their deaths. After the defeat of the Axis in 1945, the internal frontiers of Macedonia were restored roughly to their previous lines. Near the end of World War II in Europe, Yugoslav officials on August 2, 1944, established the People’s Republic of Macedonia as one of the six constituent republics of the state that soon became the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. With the standardization of the Macedonian language and the establishment of a Macedonian Orthodox Church, the process of constructing a Macedonian nation continued.
In Greece a civil war between communist and royalist forces broke out in 1946 and lasted until 1949. For the rest of the 20th century, the Greek state maintained an assimilationist policy toward the Macedonian-speaking population of Greek Macedonia, seeking to incorporate them fully into the Greek nation. By the beginning of the 21st century, the vast majority of the inhabitants of Greek Macedonia had developed a Greek national identity. The creation of this fairly homogeneous population was the result of a long campaign of assimilationist pressure by the Greek state. There remains, however, a small Macedonian minority—that is, people who have a Macedonian, not a Greek, national identity. Representatives of this minority, whose existence is not acknowledged by the Greek government, have sought recognition at the European Court of Human Rights.
On September 8, 1991, as Yugoslavia was breaking up, the Republic of Macedonia was established as an independent state by a vote of its citizens. Domestically, the republic struggled to maintain a peaceful equilibrium between its Orthodox Christian Macedonian majority, which included nationalists committed to preserving the republic as a Macedonian state, and the Muslim Albanian minority, which sought rights and benefits of full citizenship. Internationally, the republic was challenged by the Greek government’s commitment to maintaining a monopoly on the name “Macedonia” and to preventing the republic from being recognized under its constitutional name, the Republic of Macedonia, and from joining international organizations (see Macedonia: a contested name). Only by accepting provisional designation as “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (FYROM) was Macedonia able to join the United Nations (UN) in 1993. A Greek economic boycott of Macedonia begun in 1994 was brought to an end in 1995 when the two countries signed a UN-brokered Interim Accord in September of that year. Under the terms of the accord, Greece agreed not to prevent Macedonia’s entry into the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as long as it did so under its provisional designation, “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” In spite of this agreement, however, in 2008 Greece blocked Macedonia’s accession to membership in NATO. It also stymied Macedonia’s attempt to join the EU. In 2011 the International Court of Justice ruled that Greece had violated the 1995 deal by blocking the republic’s attempt to join NATO.
Bilateral negotiations over the name, sponsored by the United Nations, continued for years without any significant progress. Then, in 2018, after the defeat of the nationalist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization–Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (Vnatrešno-Makedonska Revolucionerna Organizacija–Demokratska Partija za Makedonsko Nacionalno Edinstvo; VMRO-DPMNE) and the rise to power of the more moderate Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (Socijaldemostratski Sojuz na Makedonija; SDSM) under the leadership of Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, the political environment in the republic became much more amenable to a resolution of the name dispute. Zaev’s government terminated the policy of “antiquization,” under which airports and major highways had been named after ancient Macedonian heroes and neoclassical buildings and monumental statues of Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great had been erected in central Skopje. This Macedonian nationalist assertion of continuity with ancient Macedonia had offended Greek historical sensibilities and damaged relations between Macedonia and Greece.
On June 12, 2018, Zaev and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met in a small village on the shore of Lake Prespa (which is divided between Albania, Macedonia, and Greece), and the foreign ministers of the two countries signed what came to be known as the Prespa Agreement. The most important provision of the agreement was that the official, constitutional name of the “Second Party,” to be used both domestically and internationally, would be the “Republic of North Macedonia” (Macedonian: Republika Severna Makedonija) or “North Macedonia” for short. In exchange, the “First Party,” Greece, would agree to not object to North Macedonia’s application to join international organizations and to actually support its accession invitation to both NATO and the EU. According to other provisions of the agreement, the official language of North Macedonia would be “the Macedonian language,” whereas the nationality of the majority of its citizens would be “Macedonian/citizen of the Republic of North Macedonia.”
The extreme sensitivity of every aspect of the name issue and the necessity of specifying exactly how the terms “Macedonia” and “Macedonian” would be used was reflected in other provisions of the agreement. It specified that all adjectival references to “the State, its official organs, and other public entities” should be consistent with the new constitutional name, the Republic of North Macedonia. Moreover, the agreement stated that all other uses of the terms “Macedonia” and “Macedonian” would involve the acknowledgment that the two parties understood them to refer to different histories, cultures, and heritages. In effect, each country would use the terms with different meanings. The two parties also noted that “the official language and other attributes of the Second Party are not related to the ancient Hellenic civilization history, culture, and heritage of the northern region of the First Party.” Greece, in this manner, strongly rejected Macedonian nationalist claims to the glories of the ancient Macedonians and Alexander the Great that Greece has always maintained as its exclusive national heritage. The agreement also included promises of cooperation in the use of national symbols and geographical names as well as in the fields of defense, diplomacy, economics, and education.
On January 11, 2019, the Macedonian parliament voted to change the constitution per the Prespa Agreement, including the adoption of the Republic of North Macedonia as the country’s official name. The Greek parliament then ratified the Prespa Agreement on January 25. In both countries the domestic reaction to the agreement was largely hostile. Macedonian nationalists declared the agreement a disaster. Greek nationalists denounced the politicians responsible for it and called for their execution for treason. Violent protests against the agreement broke out in both countries. Internationally, the Prespa Agreement was received much more positively. Leaders of EU and NATO countries welcomed the agreement and praised both Zaev and Tsipras for taking significant risks to bring an end to the long-standing dispute and promote peace and stability in the southern Balkans.
. On February 6 the NATO member states signed the accession protocol with North Macedonia. On February 12 North Macedonia’s name change was officially promulgated and went into force when the two countries notified the UN that the Prespa Agreement had been completed. It seemed, therefore, that the Macedonian conflict, the global cultural war that had been waged by the two countries since the breakup of Yugoslavia and the declaration of independence by the Republic of Macedonia in 1991, might be coming to an end.