Macedonia

Macedonia is a landlocked country in the Balkan Peninsula of southeastern Europe, north of Greece.

Parts of the territory were occupied by Illyrians in antiquity, who were followed by various tribal peoples and Romans conquests – Alexander the Great was born there in 4th century BC. When the Roman Empire was divided in the 4th century AD, the region came under the Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople. The Byzantines succumbed to Slavic raiders arrived during the 6th century and Christianity took hold in the 9th century when the Bulgarian Empire took hold, followed by the rise of Byzantine power again in 1018, and a brief Norman occupation in the 1080s. The Bulgarian Empire rose to prominence again in the 13th century but was plagued by difficulties and the Byzantine Empire took over again in the 14th century. This was followed by ‘liberation’ by the Serbian Empire, but the Balkan region was later divided and ruled by the Ottoman Empire for the following 5 centuries. The fight to establish an autonomous state of Macedonia started in the 1800s with the rise of various revolutionary nationalist organisations, culminating in the Ilinden uprising of August 1903, which was brutally suppressed by the Turks in October of the same year. After two Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan territory was divided up between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. The new territory was named Southern Serbia and became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after World War I, which was later renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was occupied by Axis forces during World War II and liberated in 1944. The People’s Republic of Macedonia was formed in 1944, renamed Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1963 and later dropped ‘Socialist’ from its title when it succeeded from Yugoslavia and held a referendum to become independent on 8 September 1991, formally ratified in January 1992. Macedonia remained at peace during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s but was destabilised by the influx of Albanian refugees from neighbouring states during the siege of Kosovo in 1999. Angered by perceived political and social inequalities, Albanian forces fought a civil war with support from Macedonian Albanians to try to establish a separate state, but peace was negotiated with NATO in 2001 resulting in law changes but no change to the borders. Macedonia became an official candidate for EU membership in 2005 and hopes to join NATO.