North Macedonia
North Macedonia, a landlocked country in Southeast Europe, received that name on the 12th of February 2019. On that day its government announced that constitutional amendments had taken effect, and it informed the United Nations and its member states. Yet many citizens and local media outlets still call the country simply Macedonia. Over 1.83 million people live here, and a quarter of them live in the capital, Skopje. It is a place of mountains, ancient lakes and a long river valley. Kingdoms, empires and federations have all ruled it, and for years it argued with a neighbour over the right to use its own name. Why did a single word matter so much? Who shaped this land before it became a state? And how does a small country without a coast hold together several peoples and faiths?
The word Macedonia traces back to the ancient Greek adjective makednós, meaning tall. The ancient Macedonians, the Makedónes, may have been named as highlanders or as the tall ones. The linguist Robert Beekes argued that both words come from a pre-Greek source and cannot be explained through Indo-European roots. Another linguist, Filip De Decker, says Beekes's arguments are insufficiently supported.
For centuries the name barely survived as a geographical label. Apart from a Byzantine theme called Macedonia, it faded during the Byzantine and Ottoman eras. Nationalist movements revived it in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian nationalists all treated the region as a national cause. Between the world wars, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia banned the name as part of its policy of Serbianisation toward local Slavic speakers. The name was first adopted officially at the end of the Second World War, by the new Socialist Republic of Macedonia. That republic became one of six in Yugoslavia, and in 1991 it declared independence as the Republic of Macedonia.
Greece objected as soon as the dispute was reignited by that independence. It wanted a geographical qualifier, so that the name would not be confused with Greek Macedonia, its own region to the south. Greece also objected to the word Macedonian for the neighbour's largest ethnic group, since some ethnic Greeks identify themselves as Macedonians. It accused the new state of appropriating symbols and figures it counts as part of Greek culture, such as the Vergina Sun and Alexander the Great. It further accused the state of promoting a United Macedonia that would take in territory from Greece, Bulgaria, Albania and Serbia.
When the country joined the United Nations in 1993, it was admitted under the provisional reference "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia". The lower-case "former" was chosen on purpose to show that the label was temporary. Even so, most UN members soon dropped it. Over 100 of them, and four of the five permanent members of the Security Council, recognised the Republic of Macedonia instead. The UN set up a negotiating process with a mediator, Matthew Nimetz.
The settlement came with the Prespa agreement, signed with Greece on the 17th of June 2018. Under it the country agreed to become the Republic of North Macedonia and to stop public use of the Vergina Sun. It kept the word Macedonian for its people, but both sides acknowledged that the term refers to different historical contexts and cultural heritage. Both countries also agreed to remove irredentist material from textbooks and maps. The Macedonian parliament ratified the deal on the 5th of July, with 69 members voting in favour.
A non-binding referendum followed on the 30th of September 2018. Roughly nine in ten voters backed the change, but a boycott held turnout to 37 percent, short of the 50 percent required. That left the decision to parliament, which approved the name change on the 19th of October with the two-thirds majority needed for constitutional amendments. The amendment vote itself passed on the 11th of January 2019. Greece's parliament then ratified the Prespa agreement, together with the protocol on NATO accession, on the 8th of February. The agreement replaced the Interim Accord of 1995.
Bylazora, a town on the Vardar river in what is now Sveti Nikole municipality, was once the seat of the Paeonian kings. Later the royal seat moved to Stobi, near modern Gradsko. The kingdom of Paeonia lay just north of ancient Macedonia and roughly matches today's country. Illyrian tribes such as the Dardani and the Enchelae lived to the northwest and southwest.
In the late 6th century BC, Darius the Great of Persia conquered Paeonia. The Persians withdrew from their European territories after their defeat in the Second Persian invasion of Greece in 479 BC. In 356 BC, Philip II of Macedon absorbed Lynkestis, Pelagonia and Deuriopus into his kingdom. Paeonia, then led by Lycceius, became his vassal the same year. A Paeonian cavalry contingent under Ariston later rode with the army of Alexander the Great.
Celtic armies attacked the area in 310 BC and were beaten by Cassander. In 279 the Gauls reached as far as Delphi, and their chieftain Brennus held Paeonia for a time. Afterwards a ruler named Leon restored the Paeonian kingdom. The Dardani under Longarus captured Bylazora in 230 BC. Antigonus Doson founded the city of Antigoneia in 227 BC, and Philip V of Macedon took Bylazora ten years later.
The Romans created the province of Macedonia in 146 BC. By the time of Diocletian it had been split in two. The northern half, Macedonia Salutaris, meaning wholesome Macedonia, took in all of Paeonia with Stobi as its capital. Scupi came under Roman rule in the time of Domitian and fell within the province of Moesia. Greek stayed dominant in the eastern empire, especially south of the Jireček Line, while Latin spread into Macedonia to some extent.
By the late 6th century AD, Slavic tribes led by Pannonian Avars had settled across the Balkans, including this territory. They probably merged with local people into mixed Byzantine-Slavic communities. Around 680, a Bulgar ruler named Kuber led a largely Christian group called the Sermesianoi into Pelagonia. In the 9th century the Slavic tribes converted to Christianity under Tsar Boris I of Bulgaria. In 886, Saint Clement of Ohrid founded the Ohrid Literary School on Boris's order, and it helped spread the Cyrillic script.
Tsar Samuil moved the Bulgarian capital to Skopje and then to Ohrid. In 1014 the Byzantine Emperor Basil II defeated his armies, and within four years Byzantium controlled the Balkans again. The Bulgarian Patriarchate was reduced to the Archbishopric of Ohrid. Normans briefly occupied the region in the 1080s. In the 14th century Skopje became the capital of Tsar Stefan Dušan's Serbian Empire. After his death, the Kingdom of Prilep emerged from the empire's collapse, only to be seized by the Ottomans before the century ended.
The Ottomans held the central Balkans for five centuries as the Eyalet of Rumelia. In Turkish, Rumeli means Land of the Romans, a name for lands taken from the Byzantine Empire. By the 19th century the province was reduced to central Albania and western North Macedonia, with its capital at Manastir, present-day Bitola. It was abolished in 1867, and its Macedonian lands passed to the vilayets of Manastir, Kosova and Selanik. Many reformers of the Bulgarian National Revival came from this region, including the Miladinov brothers. When the Bulgarian Exarchate was established in 1870, the bishoprics of Skopje, Debar, Bitola, Ohrid, Veles and Strumica voted to join it.
The 2nd of August is the country's major national holiday, Republic Day, and it marks the Ilinden uprising of 1903. The Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization, or IMRO, organised the revolt against the Ottomans. Membership was at first open only to Bulgarians, and later to all inhabitants of European Turkey regardless of ethnicity or religion. After early successes, including the founding of the Kruševo Republic, the uprising was crushed with much loss of life. Its leaders are celebrated as national heroes. Gotse Delchev, Pitu Guli, Dame Gruev and Yane Sandanski are named in the lyrics of the anthem, "Denes nad Makedonija", meaning "Today over Macedonia".
The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 ended Ottoman rule. By the treaty concluded at Bucharest, Serbia annexed most of the territory, though the Strumica region passed to Bulgaria. An anti-Bulgarian campaign followed in the areas under Serbian control. As many as 641 Bulgarian schools and 761 churches were closed, and clergy and teachers were expelled. IMRO and local Albanians then organised the Ohrid-Debar uprising, and the rebels briefly captured Gostivar, Struga and Ohrid. According to a Carnegie Endowment report, a Serbian army of 100,000 regulars put it down. Tens of thousands of refugees fled to Bulgaria and Albania.
In the fall of 1915 the Central Powers invaded Serbia, and Bulgaria occupied most of today's North Macedonia. The zone was called the Military Inspection Area of Macedonia and answered to a Bulgarian military commander. The historian Robert Gerwarth judges that its denationalisation policy was almost identical in intent and execution to the Serbian one before it. The Bulgarian language became mandatory, Serbian priests were deported, and Serbian-sounding names had to be changed.
After the war the area returned to Belgrade as part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and the Strumica region was annexed in 1919. Some 50,000 Serbian army and gendarmerie were stationed in the region. By 1940, about 280 Serbian colonies with 4,200 families had been founded, against early plans for 50,000 families. In 1929 the territory became the Vardar Banovina of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On the 9th of October 1934, the IMRO member Vlado Chernozemski assassinated Alexander I of Yugoslavia. In the same year the Communist International issued a resolution that first recognised a separate Macedonian nation and language.
From 1941 to 1945 Yugoslavia was occupied by the Axis powers, and the Vardar Banovina was divided between Bulgaria and Italian-occupied Albania. Bulgarian authorities, under German pressure, rounded up and deported over 7,000 Jews from Skopje and Bitola. Harsh occupation pushed many people toward the Partisan resistance of Josip Broz Tito after 1943.
In December 1944 the Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia proclaimed the People's Republic of Macedonia inside Yugoslavia. Its linguists codified the Macedonian alphabet, building on the phonetic alphabet of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and the principles of Krste Petkov Misirkov. The republic became the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1963. Independence Day is celebrated on the 8th of September, for the 1991 referendum that endorsed leaving Yugoslavia. Robert Badinter's arbitration commission recommended recognition in January 1992, and on the 15th of January Bulgaria became the first country to recognise it.
The country stayed at peace through the Yugoslav Wars of the early 1990s. The Kosovo War in 1999 shook it badly, as an estimated 360,000 ethnic Albanian refugees took shelter there. The refugees left soon after the fighting, but Albanian nationalists on both sides of the border took up arms in pursuit of autonomy or independence.
Mount Korab, on the Albanian border, rises 2,764 metres and is the tallest peak in the country. The terrain is rugged and clearly defined by a central valley carved by the Vardar river. Mountain ranges frame the valley, with the Šar Mountains on one side and Osogovo on the other. The country covers 25,436 square kilometres and has some 748 kilometres of borders. Greece accounts for 228 kilometres, Kosovo for 159, Albania for 151, Bulgaria for 148 and Serbia for 62.
The Šar Mountains continue into the West Vardar and Pelagonia group, which includes Baba Mountain, Nidže, Kožuf and Jakupica. The Osogovo-Belasica chain is the second range, and it is older and lower than the first.
Three large lakes lie on the southern borders, Ohrid, Prespa and Dojran. Frontiers with Albania and Greece cut through them. Lake Ohrid is considered one of the oldest lakes and biotopes in the world. The country has around fifty ponds and three natural lakes. It also has nine spa towns and resorts, among them Banište, Katlanovo and Negorci.
The land is seismically active. In 1963 a major earthquake heavily damaged Skopje and killed over 1,000 people.
The country has some 1,100 large sources of water, and its rivers drain into three basins. The Aegean basin is the largest, covering 87 percent of the territory. The Vardar alone drains 80 percent of the country, and the Vardar Valley project is considered crucial for strategic development. The Black Drin forms the Adriatic basin, which receives water from Lakes Prespa and Ohrid. The smallest basin leads to the Black Sea, covers only 37 square kilometres, and lies on the northern side of Mount Skopska Crna Gora.
Summers are warm and dry, and winters are moderately cold and snowy. Recorded temperatures range from -20 degrees Celsius in winter to 40 in summer. Demir Kapija and Gevgelija are the warmest places, with July and August frequently above 40. Precipitation falls from about 1,700 millimetres in the western mountains to about 500 in the east. The climate supports wheat, maize, potatoes, poppies, peanuts and rice.
About 3,700 plant species grow here, of which around 3,200 are flowering plants, 350 are mosses and 42 are ferns. The native forests shelter bears, wild boars, wolves, foxes, chamois and deer. The lynx is found very rarely in the mountains of the west. Four national parks protect the landscape: Mavrovo, Galičica, Pelister and Šar Planina. The last was established in 2021, covers 244 square kilometres, and is the youngest of the four.
The Assembly has 120 seats, and its members are elected every four years. The country is a parliamentary democracy, and real power rests with the prime minister rather than the president. The president serves five-year terms, for a maximum of two. On the 12th of May 2024, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova took office as the first female president. Local government is split among 80 municipalities, and Skopje is governed as a group of ten of them.
The main political divide runs between parties of the ethnic Macedonian majority and those of the Albanian minority. That balance of power led to a conflict between February and August 2001. Ethnic Albanian insurgents fought the government, mostly in the north and west. A NATO ceasefire monitoring force intervened. Under the Ohrid Agreement, the government agreed to devolve more political power and cultural recognition. The Albanian side dropped separatist demands, and the insurgents handed over their weapons to NATO. Armed confrontations still came in 2007 and 2015. In April 2017, about 200 protesters stormed the Assembly after Talat Xhaferi, an ethnic Albanian and former National Liberation Army commander, was elected Speaker.
The conservative VMRO-DPMNE party, led by Nikola Gruevski, won decisively in elections on the 5th of July 2006. After the country was not invited to join NATO in 2008, that government pursued a policy called "Antiquisation". Statues of Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon went up in several cities. Airports, highways and stadiums were renamed for them. Greece saw these moves as deliberate provocations, and they further stalled the country's EU and NATO applications. In June 2017, Zoran Zaev became prime minister and ended eleven years of VMRO-DPMNE rule. His government partly reversed the policy.
At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, Greece vetoed an invitation over the naming dispute. After the Prespa deal, NATO invited the country to start accession talks on the 12th of July 2018. The accession protocol was signed in Brussels on the 6th of February 2019. The foreign affairs minister at the time was Nikola Dimitrov. On the 27th of March 2020, the country became the 30th member of NATO. Its army has 8,000 active personnel and 4,850 reservists, and a military budget of US$275 million. It has been a volunteer force since conscription ended in 2007.
The country has been an official European Union candidate since 2005. The EU's leaders approved the start of talks in March 2020. On the 17th of November 2020, Bulgaria refused to approve the negotiating framework, citing the unimplemented friendship treaty of 2017, state-supported hate speech and an ongoing nation-building process. That veto effectively blocked the start of talks. Opposition parties organised protests in July 2022 over a French proposal to break the deadlock. The Assembly passed the proposal, and accession talks officially began that month. On the 25th of September 2024, the EU decided to separate Albania from North Macedonia on the accession path. It opened its first negotiating chapters with Albania alone on the 15th of October.
The 2021 census recorded an average household size of 3.06 and an average age of 40.08 years. Population density is 72.2 persons per square kilometre. Ethnic Macedonians form the largest group, and Albanians, at around 25 percent, form the second largest. Turks come third, with official figures near 70,000 and unofficial estimates between 170,000 and 200,000. Some unofficial estimates put the Roma at up to 260,000.
Macedonian is the national and official language across the territory. It belongs to the Eastern branch of the South Slavic group and is mutually intelligible with standard Bulgarian. Since 2019, Albanian has been co-official at state level, except in defence, central police and monetary policy. Municipalities where at least 20 percent of residents belong to another ethnic minority use that minority's language locally. In the census, 1,344,815 people declared Macedonian as their language and 507,989 declared Albanian. Turkish speakers numbered 71,757, and Romani speakers 38,528. Macedonian Sign Language serves deaf people who did not pick up an oral language in childhood.
Eastern Orthodox Christians make up 46.1 percent of the population, and most belong to the Macedonian Orthodox Church. Other Christian denominations account for 13.9 percent. Muslims make up 32.2 percent, the fifth-highest share in Europe after Kosovo, Turkey, Albania, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the end of 2011 the country had 1,842 churches and 580 mosques.
The Macedonian Orthodox Church declared autocephaly in 1967. Other Orthodox churches did not recognise it until 2022, when it restored relations with the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Bishop Jovan of the Serbian Orthodox Church was jailed for 18 months for distributing church calendars and pamphlets. A total of 30,000 people are baptised across the church's provinces every year.
The Macedonian Byzantine Catholic Church was established in 1918 and has about 11,000 adherents. Its worship is held in Macedonian. Boris Trajkovski, a former president, was a well-known Protestant from the Methodist community, the oldest and largest Protestant church in the country. The Jewish community now numbers about 200 people, almost all in Skopje. Most are Sephardic, descended from 15th-century refugees expelled from Castile, Aragon and Portugal.
In 2009 the World Bank ranked the country fourth out of 178 as a "best reformatory state". Trade accounts for more than 90 percent of GDP. The government introduced a flat tax of 12 percent in 2007 and lowered it to 10 percent in 2008 to attract foreign investment. Automotive firms such as Johnson Controls, Lear, Visteon and Kostal have opened local subsidiaries. Unemployment fell from 37.2 percent to 27.3 percent in the first quarter of 2015. Even so, GDP per capita stood at 36 percent of the EU average in 2017, and the grey market is estimated at close to 20 percent of GDP.
The Yugoslav wars cost the country dearly, because Serbia had been 60 percent of its markets. Greece imposed a trade embargo in 1994-95. After the embargo ended, Greece became the country's most important business partner. Greek companies bought former state enterprises, among them the oil refinery Okta and the baking company Zhito Luks, and they employ 20,000 people.
Tourism brought in 38.5 billion denars, or €616 million, in 2016, equal to 6.7 percent of GDP. In 2019 the country received 1,184,963 tourist arrivals, of which 757,593 were foreign. Visitors come for the lakes, for over 50 small glacial lakes, and for 16 mountains higher than 2,000 metres. Skopje and the southwest drew about 60 percent of the million tourists who visited in 2017.
The railway network runs 922 kilometres, and the busiest line links the Serbian border, Kumanovo, Skopje, Veles and Gevgelija to the Greek border. The country has 17 airports, two of them international, in Skopje and Ohrid. A United States aid project called Macedonia Connects made it the first all-broadband wireless country in the world, and 461 schools were connected to the internet.
Five state universities offer higher education, and the country ranked 63rd in the Global Innovation Index in 2025. The oldest newspaper, Nova Makedonija, dates from 1944. Byzantine fresco paintings from the 11th to the 16th centuries survive in several thousand square metres, mostly in very good condition. Festivals fill the calendar, including the Ohrid Summer Festival, the Struga Poetry Evenings, which gather poets from more than 50 countries, and the Skopje Jazz Festival. The National Opera opened in 1947 with a performance of Cavalleria rusticana, then under the name Macedonian Opera. The May Opera Evenings began in May 1972 with Kiril Makedonski's Tsar Samuil, an opera about the ruler who once moved his capital to Ohrid.
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Common questions
What is North Macedonia?
North Macedonia is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe with over 1.83 million people. Its capital and largest city is Skopje, home to a quarter of the population.
When did Macedonia become North Macedonia?
The country was renamed North Macedonia on the 12th of February 2019, when its constitutional amendments took effect. The change followed the Prespa agreement with Greece, signed on the 17th of June 2018.
Why did Greece object to the name Macedonia for North Macedonia?
Greece wanted to avoid confusion with its own region of Greek Macedonia. It also objected to symbols such as the Vergina Sun and Alexander the Great, and to the idea of a United Macedonia.
When did North Macedonia join NATO?
North Macedonia became the 30th member of NATO on the 27th of March 2020. Greece had vetoed an invitation at the 2008 Bucharest summit over the naming dispute.
What is the tallest mountain in North Macedonia?
Mount Korab, in the Šar Mountains on the Albanian border, is the tallest at 2,764 metres.
What languages are spoken in North Macedonia?
Macedonian is the national and official language. Since 2019 Albanian has also been co-official at state level, and other minority languages are used locally where a group reaches 20 percent of residents.
Why has North Macedonia not yet joined the European Union?
North Macedonia has been a candidate since 2005, and talks officially began in July 2022. Bulgaria blocked the negotiating framework on the 17th of November 2020, and in September 2024 the EU separated Albania from North Macedonia on the accession path.
All sources
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- 19"In the early 19th c. the modern Greeks with their Western-derived obsession with antiquity played a crucial role in reviving the classical name 'Macedonia' in the popular consciousness of the Balkan
- 20"In 1813 Macedonia did not exist. A century later, it had become a hotly contested nationalist cause, a battlefield, and an obsession. What led to this dramatic transformation was modernity: a chilly
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