The Republic of Macedonia (otherwise known as Vardar-Macedonia) is an ancient land full of contrasts. Blessed with deep lakes, striking mountain ranges and open plains Macedonia has all the ingredients for a great holiday destination. It's problems have been tied to it's long and often troubled history. The recent redrawing of municipal bounderies should help to ease tensions between the majority ethnic Macedonians and the minority ethnic Albanians. Hopefully, with renewed internal stability and EU accession talks to soon get underway, Macedonia should make a big splash among tourists and business people alike.

Population: 2.045.262

Largest Cities (over 100,000 inhabitants):

Skopje - 657.208, Tetovo - 180.654, Kumanovo - 135.529, Gostivar - 116.107

Total area: 25,333 sq km
land: 24,856 sq km
water: 477 sq km

Skopje

Skopje (Macedonian: Скопје, Albanian Shkup, Latin Scupi; Turkish: Üsküb) is the capital city of the Republic of Macedonia. Skopje was known to the Ancient Greeks as Skopidia, and appears to have been founded in the 3rd century BC by the Dardanians, a people on the fringes of the Kingdom of Macedon. In Roman times there was town on the site called Justiniana Prima, but this was destroyed by an earthquake in 518. The town was refounded, perhaps by the early Romanians (or Vlachs), and in Byzantine times it was known as Skupi. Skopje often changed hands between the Byzantines and the Bulgarians in medieval times until it was conquered by the Serbs in the late 13th century. It was captured by the Ottomans in 1392 and known by the Turkish name Üsküb or Üsküp during the half-millennium of Ottoman rule.

Ottoman Üsküb was the capital of the vilayet (district) of Kosovo, which occupied a much greater area than the modern Serbian province of Kosovo. The Turkish writer Dilger Zede visited the city in the 17th century and wrote: "I travelled for a long time across that country of Rumelija and I saw a lot of beautiful cities and I was amazed from the Alah blessings, but not one has impressed and delighted me so much as the heavens city of Skopje across which passes the river Vardar." In 1689, however, it was burned by the Austrian general Ennea Silvia Piccolomini to eradicate an epidemic of cholera. It only revived in the 19th century with the building of the railway from Belgrade to Thessaloniki, which passed through Skopje.

In 1910 Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, later to become famous as Mother Teresa, was born in Üsküb into a Catholic Albanian family. In 1913 the city fell to the Serbs during the Balkan War and was ceded to Serbia, which became the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918 and Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. It was under Bulgarian rule during both World Wars but in 1945 it became the capital of the Republic of Macedonia. In 1963 Skopje was struck by a major earthquake, in which 1,070 people were killed and another 120,000 were made homeless. 80% of the city was destroyed and numerous cultural monuments were seriously damaged. A major international relief effort saw the city rebuilt quickly, though much of its old Turkish aspect was lost in the process.

Under Yugoslav rule Skopje grew rapidly and became a major industrial centre for the southern Balkans region. In 1991 the Yugoslav federation broke up and Skopje became the capital of the independent Republic of Macedonia. Greece objected to the use of the name Macedonia by the new state and imposed an economic blockade, which severely damaged Skopje's economy by closing its access to the sea through Thessaloniki. The blockade was lifted in 1995 following an agreement between Greece and Macedonia. Many Greek nationalists still refer to the republic as "the Republic of Skopje" and its inhabitants (pejoratively) as "Skopjeans" (Skopiani in Greek).

Macedonian culture

The Republic of Macedonia, is a diverse country, the music of the Macedonian Slavs brings together a mixture of multiple styles from Turkish music, Albanian music, Roma music and other ethnic Balkan music idioms. Local dances are called "oro"; an often referenced dance is the Teškoto (.wav sound file) from the village of Galičnik. Macedonian folk songs are often historical in nature, with lyrics detailing great heroes and warriors, though love songs are also common. The music of Eastern Europe are known for complex rhythms, and Macedonian music exemplifies this trait. Folk songs like "Pominis li libe Todoro" can be as complex as 22/16, played as 2-2-3-2-2-3-2-2-2-2. Old-fashioned musicians also have a distinctive characteristic of stretching out the beats to add tension to the notes. The gajda bagpipe was the most common folk instrument, but has now become an instrument for concert recitation, drawing on recent legends like Pece Atanasovski, leader of the Radio Skopje ensemble Ansaml na Narodni Instrumenti, as the source of modern tradition. Macedonian folk orchestras consist of a clarinet or saxophone, drum kit, bass guitar, accordion and guitar, sometimes with modern synthesizers and drum machines. These orchestras are very popular, and include virtuoso musicians like Skender Ameti on accordion and Miroslav Businovski on clarinet.

Newly-composed folk songs, often with a ballad-like tone, are also popular, especially Vaska Ilieva and Aleksander Sarievski. Local rock and roll bands like Leb i sol also have a following, and have include folk elements in their compositions. The lead singer and guitarist of Leb i Sol Vlatko Stefanovski has made an international career partly based on the skill in reproducing the traditional rhythm and tempo in his modern music.

Calgia is an urban style, calgia is played by bands (calgii) with a def (tambourine) and tarabuka (hourglass drum) providing percussion for ut (lute), kanun (zither), clarinet and violin. Though modern musicians have updated the calgia into a spectrum of hard and soft, classical and pop sounds, some traditional musicians remain. Perhaps the most influential of recent years was Tale Ognenovski, who plays a wide variety of traditional and modern sounds.

Macedonia has a large Gypsy minority, many of whom are professional musicians. Long oppressed and forced into certain lower-class and disreputable occupations, Gypsies are, in many places, the only local professional performers. Gypsy orchestras typically contain electric guitars and other modern instruments. Popular Gypsy musicians include Esma Redzepova, Ferus Mustafov and Stevo Teodosievski.

A brief history of Macedonia

The lands governed by the Republic of Macedonia were part of a number of ancient states and former empires; ancient Macedon (which established the name of the whole Macedonian region), Paionia, the Roman and Byzantine empires . In the Middle Ages they were part of the Bulgarian state becoming a major culture center after Climent of Ohrid established the Ohrid Literary School in 866 . In the 14th century the region was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. During the long period of domination, the Ottomans settled large numbers of Turks and other muslims in the country. Macedonia was therefore one of the Ottomans most prized possesions. And if was the attempt to try and keep Macedonia which helped lead to the Ottoman downfall.

The Russo-Turkish War, 1877-78 finished the Treaty of San Stefano by which Turkey recognized independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro and autonomy of Bulgaria with those lands included. Alarmed by the extension of the Russian power into the Balkans and apprehensive of the eventual fall of Constantinople to the Russians, the Great Powers modified the provisions of the treaty in the infamous Congress of Berlin which resulted in returning its territories back to Ottoman rule. This lead to the establishment of IMRO and the organizing the unsuccessful Ilinden uprising which provoked the Balkan Wars.

Following the two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 and the dissolution of the Ottomans state, Vardar Macedonia became part of Serbia and was called Južna Srbija ("Southern Serbia") , where as the rest of the region was devided to Aegean Macedonia (Greece) and Pirin Macedonia (Bulgaria). After the First World War Serbia and Montenegro created the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and in 1929, the kingdom was officially renamed Yugoslavia and divided into provinces called "banovinas". The territory of the modern Republic of Macedonia became the Province of Vardar (Vardarska banovina).

In 1941, Yugoslavia was occupied by the Axis powers. The Banate of Vardar was returned to Bulgaria and part of it was handed to Italian-occupied Albania. After the end of the Second World War, People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was established, in which People's Republic of Macedonia within Yugoslavia became one of the six republics of the Yugoslav federation. Following the federation's renaming to Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1963, the People's Republic of Macedonia was likewise renamed Socialist Republic of Macedonia. The republic renamed itself the Republic of Macedonia in 1991 and peacefully seceded from Yugoslavia. It came into conflict with Greece over its official name soon after its declaration of independence, and as of 2005 the dispute still persists and with Bulgaria over the Macedonian language which was settled.

The Republic of Macedonia remained at peace through the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s but was significantly disrupted by the Kosovo War in 1999, when an estimated 360,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo took refuge in the country. They returned quickly following the war but soon after, Albanian radicals on both sides of the border took up arms in pursuit of autonomy or independence for the Albanian-populated areas of the Republic. A short war was fought between government and ethnic Albanian rebels, mostly in the north and west of the country, in March-June 2001. It ended with the intervention of a small NATO ceasefire monitoring force and government undertakings to devolve greater political power and cultural recognition to the Albanian minority.