A 2019 rename ended a decades-long fight over “Macedonia”
North Macedonia is a landlocked Balkan republic bordering Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, and Serbia—roughly the northern third of the wider geographic Macedonia. After Yugoslavia’s breakup it declared independence in 1991 as the Republic of Macedonia, then took “North” under the 2018 Prespa deal.
Classical Paeonia and Pelagonia covered much of the terrain before Persian, Macedonian, and Roman turns. The Paeonian kings ruled from Bylazora, in today’s Sveti Nikole municipality. Darius the Great’s Persians took Paeonia in the late sixth century BCE and pulled out of Europe after their defeat in Greece in 479 BCE. In 356 BCE Philip II folded Lynkestis, Pelagonia and southern Paeonia into Macedon, and the rest of Paeonia became his vassal.
Celtic raiders were beaten back by Cassander in 310 BCE, but in 279 Gauls under Brennus overran the region for a time. Rome created its province of Macedonia in 146 BCE, later split by Diocletian into Macedonia Prima in the south and Macedonia Salutaris. Slavic tribes, led by Pannonian Avars, settled the area by the late sixth century CE and became Christian in the ninth under Tsar Boris I of Bulgaria. In 886 Saint Clement founded the Ohrid Literary School on Boris’s orders, and it helped spread the Cyrillic script.
The Greek-rooted name Macedonia, from makednós (“tall” or “taper”), revived in nineteenth-century nationalist maps after Byzantine and Ottoman centuries largely forgot the label outside a theme name. Bulgaria ruled the ground in both world wars; 1945 made it a Yugoslav republic.
A June 2018 Prespa agreement with Greece produced the Republic of North Macedonia eight months later. A referendum logged about ninety percent yes but missed fifty percent turnout amid boycott, so parliament finished the change. NATO membership and a 2005 EU candidacy mark the diplomatic payoff of the rename.
Source: North Macedonia
