Before telling anything else, it's worth clearing up the most common confusion. The word "Macedonia" refers, first of all, to a geographical region in the southern Balkans that is now divided among three countries: most of the south, known as Aegean Macedonia, is Greek; a strip to the east, Pirin Macedonia, is Bulgarian; and the northern portion, Vardar Macedonia, is today's independent country of North Macedonia.
Ancient Macedon, the kingdom of Philip II and Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, was centred in what is now northern Greece, around cities such as Pella and Aegae (Vergina). That kingdom's language and culture were tied to the ancient Greek world. The modern Slavic country, by contrast, grew out of the Slavs who reached the Balkans almost a thousand years later, in the early Middle Ages, and who speak a South Slavic language related to Bulgarian and Serbian.
In other words: the territory of present-day North Macedonia lay on the edges of that ancient kingdom, but the nation living there today is not directly descended from Alexander's Macedonians. Much of the dispute with Greece turns precisely on that distinction, which serious historians maintain carefully and which nationalists on both sides have tended to blur.
In antiquity, the territory of today's North Macedonia was inhabited by peoples such as the Paeonians, in the valley of the Vardar river (the Axios to the Greeks), and by Illyrian and Thracian tribes in the mountains. They were not Macedonians as such: they lived north of the kingdom's core.
In the 4th century BC, Philip II of Macedon expanded his kingdom northwards and subdued the Paeonians, bringing these lands into the Macedonian orbit. Philip himself founded cities in the region; one of them was Heraclea Lyncestis, near present-day Bitola, which would carry his influence for centuries. His son, Alexander the Great, would set out from Macedon to conquer the Persian Empire and carry Greek culture as far as India.
That ancient heritage is present in the country's soil —in the ruins of Heraclea, with its mosaics and theatre— but it is a territorial heritage, not an ethnic or linguistic one in the modern sense. The Slavic state's claim to Alexander's legacy, above all during the controversial official "antiquisation" campaign of the 2000s, was one of the things that most irritated Greece.
After the Macedonian kingdom fell to Rome in the 2nd century BC, the region became part of the Roman world. Running across the south of today's country was the Via Egnatia, the great road linking the Adriatic with Constantinople, which turned cities such as Heraclea Lyncestis into important stops for trade and the legions.
When the Roman Empire split, these lands went to the eastern half, the Byzantine Empire, and stayed within its religious and cultural sphere: Eastern-rite Christianity and Greek as the language of administration. For centuries, the region was a frontier and a corridor, fought over, crossed by armies and battered by invasions.
That position as a crossroads —between the Adriatic and the Aegean, between Rome and Constantinople, between the Slavic north and the Greek south— left a lasting mark on this territory and partly explains the mix of peoples, languages and religions that still defines it today.
The decisive event in shaping today's country came from the 6th century onwards, when waves of Slavic peoples crossed the Danube and settled across much of the Balkans, including the region of Macedonia. These South Slavs gradually replaced or absorbed the earlier population and permanently changed the linguistic and demographic map of the area.
Byzantium never disappeared entirely, but for long stretches its control over the Balkan interior was nominal. Over the following centuries, the territory swung between the Byzantine orbit and that of the new Slavic states that were emerging, above all the First Bulgarian Empire, which in its expansion took in much of Vardar Macedonia.
Today's Slavic Macedonian population essentially descends from those Slavic settlements. Their language, Macedonian, is a South Slavic language very close to Bulgarian, something that also underlies the tensions with Bulgaria, which for a long time regarded the Slavic Macedonians and their language as a variant of the Bulgarian people and language.
If one place sums up the country's historical identity, it is Ohrid. On the shores of its lake, in 886, Saint Clement of Ohrid —a disciple of the brothers Cyril and Methodius, the "apostles to the Slavs"— founded a literary school that became one of the great cultural centres of the medieval Slavic world. When Clement was made bishop in 893, his companion Saint Naum carried on the work; the monastery of Saint Naum, beside the lake, still bears his name.
It was in this setting, between the south of the First Bulgarian Empire and the legacy of Cyril and Methodius, that Slavic writing spread. The first texts were written in the Glagolitic alphabet, created by Cyril and Methodius; from the tradition of these schools —Ohrid and Preslav, in Bulgaria— later came the Cyrillic alphabet, simpler and based on Greek script, which is used today by Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian itself. Cyrillic being named after Cyril is a tribute to that lineage, even though its final form was the work of his disciples.
Ohrid became the seat of an autonomous archbishopric and came to be proudly called the "Jerusalem of the Balkans" for the huge number of churches it held. That religious and cultural prestige is one of the central pieces of the modern Macedonian national story.
In the late 10th century, as the First Bulgarian Empire weakened against Byzantium, Tsar Samuel built a powerful Slavic state with Ohrid as one of its main centres, its fortress towering over the lake. For a few decades, that empire held off the Byzantine push and came to control much of the Balkans.
The end was tragic and stayed etched in the region's memory. The Byzantine emperor Basil II, nicknamed for this reason the "Bulgar Slayer" (Bulgaroktonos), defeated Samuel and, according to the most widely told account, had thousands of prisoners blinded, leaving one in every hundred with one eye to lead the rest home. Whether true or exaggerated by tradition, the scene became a symbol of how brutal those wars were. Samuel is said to have died shortly afterwards, in 1014, and within a few years Byzantium had regained control of the region.
This episode is also part of the Balkans' battles over memory: Bulgarians and Macedonians claim Samuel and his empire in different ways, which shows how much medieval history is still a matter of political debate in the area.
In the late 14th century, the advancing Ottoman Empire brought the region of Macedonia into its European domains, where it would stay for more than five centuries, until 1912. It was the longest and most formative period in the country's modern history. The Ottomans organised the territory, founded and expanded cities, and left an architectural mark that still defines many townscapes: the old bazaar of Skopje, with its stone bridge over the Vardar, and the Painted Mosque of Tetovo, from the 15th century, are reminders of that era.
Under the Ottoman system of religious communities (the millet), Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side under different statuses. The population became highly mixed: Orthodox Slavs, mostly Muslim Albanians, Turks, and Sephardic Jewish communities that had settled above all in Thessaloniki and also in inland towns. That diversity, with its tensions, is one of the keys to understanding today's Macedonia, where around a quarter of the population is ethnically Albanian.
Towards the end of the Ottoman period, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the region became a hotbed of nationalist conflict. Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks competed for the loyalty and identity of its Slavic Christian population, in what became known as the "Macedonian question". Out of that climate came, in 1893, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO), which fought for autonomy or independence; its Ilinden uprising in 1903 and the short-lived "Kruševo Republic" are central landmarks of the national imagination.
Ottoman rule ended abruptly. In the First Balkan War, in 1912, a coalition of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro drove the Ottomans out of almost all of Europe. But the victors couldn't agree on how to share the spoils, and Macedonia was the most coveted prize.
In 1913 the Second Balkan War broke out: Bulgaria, unhappy with its share, attacked its former allies and was defeated. The Treaty of Bucharest, of August 1913, sealed the partition that still stands today. Macedonia was split in three: Vardar Macedonia, in the north, went to Serbia; Aegean Macedonia, the largest part, with Thessaloniki, went to Greece; and Pirin Macedonia, the smallest portion, went to Bulgaria.
That 1913 line is the direct origin of today's country: Vardar Macedonia, the Serbian part, is what is now North Macedonia. The partition separated people who shared a language and customs, left minorities on either side of the new borders and sowed resentments that would resurface throughout the 20th century. "Divided Macedonia" is a historical wound that still shapes relations between these neighbouring states.
After 1913 and the First World War, Vardar Macedonia became part of the new state that would be Yugoslavia. In interwar royal Yugoslavia it was treated as "South Serbia", with any distinct Macedonian identity denied and assimilation policies applied.
Change came with the Second World War and the Partisan resistance. When Josip Broz Tito's socialist Yugoslavia was founded, in 1944-1946, Macedonians were recognised as a nation for the first time and the Socialist Republic of Macedonia was created, one of the six federal republics. It was a historic turn: Macedonian was officially codified as a literary language, a Macedonian Orthodox Church was established (its autonomy would take decades to be recognised by the other Orthodox Churches) and a national identity was built with its own institutions.
Being a Yugoslav republic gave the country its current borders, its capital, Skopje, and the state framework it would inherit on independence. Bulgaria and Greece always viewed that recognition with suspicion, for opposite reasons: for Sofia, the Macedonian nation was an invention that artificially separated Bulgarian brothers; for Athens, the very use of the name "Macedonia" was an appropriation of its heritage.
When Yugoslavia broke apart in the early 1990s amid appalling wars, Macedonia managed something exceptional: it left without bloodshed. On 8 September 1991, a referendum approved independence with more than 95% of votes in favour; shortly afterwards, the Assembly proclaimed the Republic of Macedonia a sovereign state.
The architect of that transition was President Kiro Gligorov, who pushed for a negotiated separation and got the Yugoslav People's Army to withdraw without a fight in early 1992. Macedonia was the only country to leave Yugoslavia peacefully, avoiding the wars that devastated Croatia, Bosnia and, later, Kosovo. Not that the risks were small: the country was poor, with a large Albanian minority and wary neighbours, and many feared it would become the next scene of violence.
That fear was not unfounded. In 2001, an armed conflict pitted government forces for months against an Albanian guerrilla group demanding more rights for its community. Open civil war was avoided thanks to the Ohrid Framework Agreement, brokered by the international community, which expanded the linguistic and political rights of the Albanian minority and decentralised power. It was a fragile but decisive compromise for the coexistence that followed.
Barely born, the new state ran into an unusual obstacle: its name. Greece firmly opposed its neighbour calling itself "Macedonia", arguing that the name belongs to Greek history and geography and that using it concealed territorial claims on the Greek province of the same name. The dispute held back the country's integration for years: to join the UN in 1993, it had to accept the provisional name "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (FYROM, by its English initials).
For more than two decades, Greece used its veto to block its neighbour's entry into NATO and the European Union. Tension escalated in the 2000s, when the Macedonian government launched an "antiquisation" campaign —naming Skopje's airport and a motorway after Alexander the Great, filling the capital with monumental statues of ancient heroes— which Athens read as a direct provocation.
The resolution came in 2018-2019 with the Prespa Agreement, signed on the shores of Lake Prespa by prime ministers Zoran Zaev and Alexis Tsipras. The country agreed to change its constitutional name to "Republic of North Macedonia", for all purposes, in exchange for Greece lifting its vetoes. The agreement also provided for a clear distinction between ancient Greek heritage and modern Slavic identity, and for the removal of contentious symbols such as the Vergina Sun. It was ratified amid strong protests in both countries and came into force in February 2019.
The name change immediately unblocked the country's international agenda. In March 2020, North Macedonia became the thirtieth member of NATO. At the same time, the road to the European Union opened up, with the formal start of accession negotiations.
But EU entry ran into a neighbour once again. This time it was Bulgaria that blocked progress, with demands over Macedonian language, history and identity: Sofia holds views on the Bulgarian origins of the nation and the language that Skopje rejects. The dispute, which many observers see as another fight over historical memory carried into politics, kept the bid stalled and fed the frustration of a population watching its European future delayed by quarrels about the past.
Today North Macedonia is a multi-ethnic parliamentary republic facing challenges both old and new: coexistence between its Slavic majority and its large Albanian minority, young people emigrating to Western Europe, a still fragile economy and the long wait in the European Union's antechamber. Its history —that of a country that had to negotiate even its own name to exist fully on the international stage— neatly sums up the burdens and hopes of the contemporary Balkans.
The 4 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Bitola, in the south near the Greek border, was one of the most important cities of European Macedonia during the Ottoman period, known at the time as Monastir. Its role as a major administrative and commercial centre drew many foreign consulates, earning it the nickname "city of consuls".
That cosmopolitan past left an elegant, Central European-style architecture still visible along the pedestrian street Širok Sokak, with its cafés and 19th-century buildings. Among those who studied at the Ottoman military academy in Monastir was the young Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey.
On the outskirts of Bitola lie the ruins of Heraclea Lyncestis, a city founded in the 4th century BC by Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. Its position on the Via Egnatia made it important for centuries, first as a Macedonian stronghold and then as a Roman and Byzantine city.
The site preserves a Roman theatre, baths, early Christian basilicas and, above all, high-quality mosaics. Heraclea is the clearest evidence of the legacy of classical antiquity on the country's soil, and at the same time a reminder that these lands lay on the edges of Philip's kingdom, not at its centre.
Prilep is the country's tobacco capital: a large share of the national output of this leaf, historically key to the local economy, comes from its fields and factories. The town spreads out among strange rock formations that dominate the landscape.
On those rocks stand the so-called Marko's Towers (Markovi Kuli), the ruins of a medieval fortress associated with King Marko, a semi-legendary late-14th-century figure who ruled the area as an Ottoman vassal and became a hero of South Slavic folklore and epic poetry. Somewhere between history and myth, he is one of the most popular figures in Balkan tradition.
The south of the country, with Bitola as its main city, borders Greek Macedonia directly. It is a partly flat farming region of livestock and tobacco, historically linked by trade and routes to Thessaloniki and the Aegean world.
That proximity shaped its history: it saw fighting in the Balkan Wars and in the First World War, when the so-called Macedonian front ran through the area. The 1913 border split neighbouring communities and turned this region into the country's southern face, the one most exposed to the long and delicate relationship with Greece.
The south is not just towns and history: above Bitola rises the Pelister massif, protected as a national park since 1948, one of the oldest in the country. Its peaks, its forests of the rare Macedonian pine (molika) and its glacial lakes —known as the "mountain eyes"— offer a natural counterpoint to the region's cultural heritage.
That mountain setting, dotted with traditional villages, completes the picture of a south where ancient ruins, Bitola's urban elegance and high-altitude nature sit side by side.
Ohrid is the most history-laden place in the country. Set on the hills overlooking the lake, the city was a leading religious and cultural centre in the Middle Ages. Tradition says it once had 365 churches, one for every day of the year, hence its nickname, the "Jerusalem of the Balkans". Churches such as Saint Sophia or Saint John at Kaneo, perched on a headland above the water, are icons of Byzantine art in the Balkans.
It was here, in 886, that Saint Clement founded the literary school that spread Slavic writing, and here that the Archbishopric of Ohrid had its seat. For its cultural heritage and natural setting, Ohrid and its lake are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Ohrid's cultural contribution was enormous. Saint Clement of Ohrid and Saint Naum, disciples of Cyril and Methodius, trained thousands of students here and produced a vast body of work in Church Slavonic. The tradition of these schools gave rise to the Cyrillic alphabet, the basis of writing across much of the Slavic world.
That legacy made Ohrid a central symbol of the Macedonian national story: the city presents itself as the cradle of Slavic literacy and of Orthodox Christianity in the region, a heritage the country proudly claims in the face of its neighbours.
Lake Ohrid is one of the oldest and deepest lakes in Europe: it is estimated to be several million years old, which makes it a rare reservoir of biodiversity, with endemic species found nowhere else in the world. Shared with Albania, it is as valuable for its nature as for its culture, which is why its UNESCO recognition covers both.
Life has gone on along its shores for millennia. The springs, fishing villages and monasteries around the lake form a landscape that blends the natural and the sacred like few others in the Balkans.
At the southern end of the lake, near the Albanian border, stands the Monastery of Saint Naum, founded around the year 900 by Naum himself, Clement's companion. The complex, surrounded by crystal-clear springs that feed part of the lake, holds the saint's tomb and a church with frescoes.
For centuries it was an important monastic centre and place of pilgrimage. Today it is still a revered site and one of the most visited spots in the country, with its gardens, its springs and the peacocks that stroll among the walls.
A few kilometres from Ohrid, Struga sits where the Black Drin flows out of the lake and sets off on its long journey to the Adriatic. It is a quiet town, bound to the water, with a different feel from the tourist bustle of Ohrid.
Struga is famous for its Poetry Evenings (Struški Večeri na Poezijata), an international poetry festival founded in 1961 that brings together poets from all over the world every year and awards a prestigious prize. It was also the birthplace of the Miladinov brothers, key figures in the 19th-century Macedonian cultural awakening, which strengthens its place in the country's literary memory.
Skopje is one of those cities where history piles up in visible layers. In antiquity it was Scupi, a Roman colony; under Byzantium and the Slavs it was a stronghold of the Balkan interior; and under the Ottomans it became a thriving trading centre, from which the old bazaar —one of the largest in the Balkans—, the stone bridge over the Vardar and several mosques and hammams survive.
The city was under Ottoman rule until 1912 and then became part of Serbia and Yugoslavia. As capital of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, it was the administrative centre from which modern Macedonian national identity was built.
The event that most shaped contemporary Skopje was the catastrophic earthquake of 26 July 1963, which destroyed much of the city, killed more than a thousand people and left tens of thousands homeless. The tragedy drew a remarkable international response at the height of the Cold War: aid came from both the Western and the Soviet blocs, and Skopje was nicknamed the "city of international solidarity".
The rebuilding, with the involvement of Japanese architect and planner Kenzo Tange, gave the city much of its modern concrete look. That history explains the contrast between the surviving Ottoman old town and the large modernist blocks of the centre.
In the 2010s, the government launched the controversial "Skopje 2014" project, which filled the centre of the capital with monumental statues, giant fountains and neoclassical and baroque-style buildings. The centrepiece was a huge monument to a "warrior on horseback" in the main square, widely identified as Alexander the Great.
The project was heavily criticised for its cost, for allegations of corruption and for its kitsch style, but above all for its political charge: it was part of the "antiquisation" campaign that pushed relations with Greece to breaking point. After the Prespa Agreement, several of those symbols were reinterpreted or renamed so as not to lay claim to the heritage of ancient Greek Macedon.
At the foot of the Šar Mountains, Tetovo is one of the centres of the country's Albanian community, which is the majority in the northwest. Its gem is the Painted Mosque (Šarena Džamija), from the 15th century, decorated with vivid floral and geometric motifs, a striking example of Ottoman art in the region.
This area was one of the flashpoints of the 2001 armed conflict between government forces and the Albanian guerrillas. After the Ohrid Framework Agreement, local political life reflected the new balance: Tetovo is home to an Albanian-language university, a symbol of the cultural rights that community won.
Nestled in the hills of the country's east, Kratovo sits inside the crater of an extinct volcano, with terraced houses, stone bridges and medieval towers. Its history is tied to mining: in Roman, Byzantine and above all Ottoman times it was an important centre for extracting silver and other metals, which brought it wealth and earned it walls and defensive towers.
That mining past explains its unusual architecture and its tunnels. Today Kratovo is one of the most picturesque towns in the country, a corner that keeps the feel of old Ottoman Macedonia.
North Macedonia is, above all, a mountainous country: its territory is crossed by ranges and massifs topping two thousand metres, with the Vardar river cutting its way through the middle. That rugged geography shaped its history —it isolated communities, sheltered rebels and bandits, and made communications difficult— and today it is one of its greatest natural attractions.
These mountains preserved traditional ways of life for centuries: shepherds' villages, hidden monasteries and a natural world that has largely been protected through national parks, some of the oldest in the Balkans.
Just a few kilometres from the capital, the Treska river carved Matka Canyon, a spectacular gorge with sheer walls and an emerald-coloured lake formed by one of the oldest dams in the country, built in the 1930s. It is an instant nature escape for the people of Skopje.
Matka also hides a double heritage: several medieval monasteries and churches nestle on its slopes, and deep inside it open caves such as Vrelo, considered one of the deepest underwater caves in the world. Kayaking, hiking and caving all come together in a surprisingly accessible spot.
In the west, along the borders with Albania and Kosovo, lies Mavrovo National Park, the largest in the country, created in 1949. It takes in high mountains —including Korab, the highest peak in North Macedonia—, forests, an artificial lake and rich wildlife that includes the endangered Balkan lynx, one of the rarest species in Europe.
It is a two-season region: in winter it hosts the country's main ski resort; in summer it fills with hikers. In the heart of the park, the half-submerged Church of Saint Nicholas, whose bell tower peeks out above the reservoir, has become one of the most recognisable images of North Macedonia.
In and around Mavrovo lies the Reka region, an area of mountain villages with a strong traditional identity. The most famous is Galičnik, known for its Galičnik Wedding (Galička Svadba), a collective ceremony that every summer recreates the region's traditional weddings with costumes and music, and that has become a symbol of national folklore.
These villages produced craftsmen, builders and church painters who worked all over the Balkans. Today many are almost deserted because of emigration, but they keep churches, stone houses and customs that make the Macedonian mountains a reservoir of traditional culture.
The western mountains are not just about nature: they were also a stage for recent history. Much of this strip has a mainly Albanian population, and some of its areas were among the flashpoints of the 2001 armed conflict. The rugged terrain, which over the centuries sheltered insurgents against the Ottomans, played that role again in modern times.
That mix —protected nature, traditional communities and a history of ethnic tensions— makes the mountain region a microcosm of the country: beautiful, diverse and shaped by the same questions of identity and coexistence that run through all of North Macedonia.
Hardly anything that happened to North Macedonia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
