The history of North Macedonia

North Macedonia is a landlocked country in the central Balkans, built around the valley of the Vardar river and the lakes of Ohrid and Prespa. In antiquity its land was home to the Paeonians and other peoples on the northern edge of the Macedonian kingdom, then part of the Roman and Byzantine worlds. In the Middle Ages Ohrid became a centre of Slavic Christianity and the seat of Tsar Samuel, and the region passed between Bulgarian, Byzantine and Serbian rulers before five centuries of Ottoman rule. Divided after the Balkan Wars, the Vardar region became a Yugoslav republic in 1944 and an independent state in 1991, and its name, disputed with Greece for almost three decades, was settled as North Macedonia in 2019.

Farming arrived early from Anatolia and the Aegean, and Neolithic villages such as Tumba Madžari, near Skopje, have yielded clay house models and figures of a mother goddess. The Vinča culture of the central Balkans reached into the north of the country. In the Iron Age most of the land belonged to the Paeonians, a people who lived along the Vardar, with Illyrians and Dardanians to the north and west, and the tribes of Lyncestis and Pelagonia in the south, around modern Bitola.

At the end of the sixth century BCE the Achaemenid Empire under Darius the Great subdued the Paeonians and deported some of them to Asia. In the fourth century BCE Philip II of Macedon annexed Upper Macedonia, founded the city of Heraclea Lyncestis near Bitola, and made Paeonia subject to him by about 356 BCE. Paeonian cavalry rode with Alexander the Great in his conquests, and after the breakup of the Macedonian Empire Paeonia regained independence for a time before being absorbed again by the kings of Macedon.

The Roman Republic defeated the Macedonian kingdom in 168 BCE and in 146 BCE created the province of Macedonia. The Via Egnatia, the great road from the Adriatic to Thessaloniki and Byzantium, passed through Heraclea and Lychnidos, today's Ohrid. Under the Roman Empire the city of Stobi, at the meeting of the Vardar and Crna rivers, became a prosperous town with a theatre and, by the second century CE, a synagogue. Scupi, near modern Skopje, was a Roman colony and military centre in the province of Moesia and later Dardania.

Christianity spread from the first centuries CE, and Stobi and Heraclea had bishops and richly decorated basilicas by the fifth century. The emperor Justinian I was born at Tauresium, south of Skopje, around 482. In 518 an earthquake destroyed Scupi, and in the sixth century the region of the Byzantine Empire was ravaged by Huns, Avars and others.

South Slavic tribes settled in the sixth and seventh centuries, forming communities the Byzantines called Sklavinias. Around 680 a Bulgar group under Kuber settled in the Pelagonian plain. By the 830s much of the region had been incorporated into the First Bulgarian Empire. After 886 the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, Clement and Naum, were sent to Ohrid, where they trained thousands of priests and teachers, wrote in Slavonic and founded the Ohrid Literary School. Clement's monastery of St Panteleimon and Naum's monastery on the lake became places of pilgrimage.

At the end of the tenth century Tsar Samuel, who ruled from about 997, made the region the centre of the Bulgarian state, with his capital on an island in Lake Prespa and then at Ohrid. His long war with Byzantium ended in 1014 when the emperor Basil II defeated his army at Kleidion; according to Byzantine chroniclers Basil blinded thousands of prisoners, and Samuel died soon after. By 1018 Byzantium ruled the whole region, and Samuel's patriarchate was reduced to the Archbishopric of Ohrid, which survived until 1767. Who should claim Samuel's state has long been disputed: historians in Bulgaria regard it as Bulgarian, while many in North Macedonia see it as an early Macedonian state.

For two centuries the region changed hands between Byzantium, a revived Bulgarian state and local lords. In the fourteenth century it was conquered by the Serbian kingdom, and Skopje became a royal capital: there, in 1346, Stefan Dušan was crowned emperor of the Serbs and Greeks. After his empire broke up, the Mrnjavčević family ruled from Prilep. King Marko, remembered as a hero in South Slav epic songs, became an Ottoman vassal and died fighting for the sultan at Rovine in 1395.

The Ottoman Empire took Skopje in 1392 and ruled the region for more than five hundred years, as part of the province of Rumelia. In the fifteenth century Albanian lords in the west, among them the Kastrioti family of Skanderbeg, resisted the Ottomans until 1479. Skopje became an Ottoman city of mosques, markets and caravanserais, and after 1492 Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain settled in Skopje, Bitola and Štip. Many people in the region, especially Albanians and some Slav speakers, converted to Islam, while Turks settled in the towns and plains.

In the nineteenth century the Ottoman lands called Macedonia, a geographical region far larger than today's country and stretching to Thessaloniki and the Aegean, became the prize in a three-way competition between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. Each built churches and schools to win the loyalty of the Slav-speaking Orthodox population, whose sense of identity was contested. The Bulgarian Exarchate, a separate church created in 1870, won many followers. In 1878 the Treaty of San Stefano briefly assigned most of the region to a large Bulgaria, but the Congress of Berlin returned it to the Ottomans the same year.

In 1893 revolutionaries founded the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, IMRO, which sought autonomy for Macedonia. On 2 August 1903, St Elijah's Day or Ilinden, it launched an uprising, and at Kruševo the rebels proclaimed a republic that lasted about ten days before Ottoman troops crushed the revolt, burning villages and killing many civilians. Ilinden is now the national day of North Macedonia, though Bulgaria also commemorates the uprising as part of its own history.

In the First Balkan War of 1912 Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria drove the Ottomans out of Macedonia, then fell out over the spoils. After the Second Balkan War the Treaty of Bucharest in 1913 gave the Vardar valley to Serbia, the southern half of the region to Greece and a smaller eastern part to Bulgaria. In the First World War Bulgaria occupied the Vardar region from 1915 to 1918, and the Macedonian front ran across its south.

After 1918 the area was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, called South Serbia and from 1929 the Vardar Banovina, governed from Skopje. Belgrade treated the Slav population as Serbs and suppressed both Bulgarian and Macedonian identity, while IMRO waged a campaign of terror and in 1934 helped organise the assassination of King Alexander in Marseille.

In the Second World War the Axis occupied Yugoslavia in 1941. Bulgaria took most of the Vardar region, and Italian-ruled Albania annexed the Albanian-populated west. In March 1943 Bulgarian police and soldiers rounded up the Jews of Skopje, Bitola and Štip, more than 7,000 people, held them in a tobacco warehouse in Skopje, and sent them by train to the Treblinka death camp, where almost all were murdered in the Holocaust. Communist Partisans organised resistance from 1941 and grew strong from 1943. On 2 August 1944, the anniversary of Ilinden, the Anti-Fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia, ASNOM, met at the monastery of Prohor Pčinjski and proclaimed a Macedonian state within a federal Yugoslavia.

Under Josip Broz Tito, the People's Republic of Macedonia, later the Socialist Republic, was one of six Yugoslav republics. The Macedonian language was standardised on the basis of the central dialects and written in a Cyrillic alphabet, and a Macedonian Orthodox Church declared its independence from the Serbian church in 1967. Yugoslav policy encouraged a distinct Macedonian national identity, which Bulgaria in particular has regarded as built on Bulgarian heritage, a disagreement that has persisted. On 26 July 1963 an earthquake destroyed about 80 percent of Skopje and killed more than 1,000 people, and the city was rebuilt with international help. The republic remained one of the poorer parts of Yugoslavia, with a large Albanian minority concentrated in the west and north.

As Yugoslavia broke apart, voters approved independence in a referendum on 8 September 1991, and the country, led by President Kiro Gligorov, was the only republic to leave without war. Its name immediately became an international dispute. Greece objected to the use of "Macedonia" without a qualifier, arguing that the name belonged to a Greek region and to ancient Greek heritage, that it implied territorial claims on northern Greece, and that the new state was appropriating Greek symbols such as the Vergina Sun and Alexander the Great. The government in Skopje held that Macedonia was the name its people had long used for themselves, their land and their Slavic language, and that it had no claims on Greek territory.

The country was admitted to the United Nations in April 1993 under the provisional reference "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia". Greece imposed a trade embargo in 1994, which ended after the Interim Accord of 1995, under which the country changed its flag and Greece agreed not to block its membership of international organisations under the provisional name. Talks on a final name dragged on, and in 2008 Greece blocked an invitation to join NATO. The nationalist governments of Nikola Gruevski from 2006 to 2016 deepened the rift by emphasising links to ancient Macedonia, notably in the Skopje 2014 building programme of statues and neoclassical facades.

Relations between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians, who make up about a quarter of the population, were the other great test. In 1999 some 340,000 refugees arrived from the war in Kosovo. In 2001 Albanian insurgents of the National Liberation Army fought government forces for several months. The Ohrid Framework Agreement of 13 August 2001 ended the conflict, giving Albanian official status where it is spoken by at least 20 percent of the population, decentralising government and expanding minority rights.

After a wiretapping scandal and mass protests, a coalition led by the Social Democrat Zoran Zaev took power in 2017, despite an attack on parliament by nationalist protesters that April. Zaev and the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras signed the Prespa Agreement on 17 June 2018. The country would become the Republic of North Macedonia, the Macedonian language and nationality would be recognised, and both sides acknowledged that Greeks and the people of North Macedonia use the terms Macedonia and Macedonian with reference to different histories and cultural heritages. Opponents in both countries protested. A referendum in September 2018 backed the deal but fell short of 50 percent turnout, and parliament amended the constitution by a two-thirds majority. The agreement took effect on 12 February 2019, and North Macedonia joined NATO on 27 March 2020.

The road to the European Union, on which the country has been a candidate since 2005, then ran into objections from Bulgaria over history and language. Talks opened in July 2022 after a French-brokered compromise that requires North Macedonia to add Bulgarians to the peoples listed in its constitution, an amendment that has not won the needed two-thirds majority. In 2024 the conservative VMRO-DPMNE returned to power, with Hristijan Mickoski as prime minister and Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova as the first woman elected president, and the government has refused to make the change without guarantees from Bulgaria. On 16 March 2025 a fire at a nightclub in Kočani killed 63 people, mostly young; investigators found that the club had operated with an illegally obtained licence, and the disaster brought nationwide protests against corruption. As of 2026 no negotiating chapters had been opened.