Macedonia, Macedonian Makedonija, Modern Greek Makedhonía, Bulgarian Makedoniya, region in the south-central Balkans that comprises north-central Greece, southwestern Bulgaria, and the independent Republic of 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 in Bulgaria, with its centre at Blagoevgrad. The Republic of 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 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 have resulted 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 loyalty 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 in the 4th century ce into eastern and western halves, 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. Most of the region subsequently fell under the sway of the first Bulgarian empire in the 9th century. 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, with 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.
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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 again occupied almost 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 which 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 has been 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 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 country was challenged by the Greek government’s commitment to maintaining a monopoly on the name “Macedonia” and to preventing the new 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” was Macedonia able to join the United Nations in 1993. A Greek economic boycott of Macedonia begun in 1994 was brought to an end in 1995 when the two countries signed an Interim Accord in September of that year. Under its terms, Greece’s fear that the republic would make territorial claims to Greek Macedonia was assuaged by the republic’s promise not to do so. Both countries also agreed to submit the name issue to UN-led mediation, though in 2009 Greece would again protest the republic’s use of the name Macedonia and blocked its accession to membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.