Blackwell Reference Online

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Region in the centre of the balkan peninsula. Among those contributing to its extreme ethnic complexity have been Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Albanians, Turks, and Armenians. Ruled by Turkey (see turkey and europe ) until the early twentieth century, the territory had become the object of increasing rivalry between greece , serbia , and bulgaria . Indeed, the last of these countries would have obtained nearly all of Macedonia in 1878 had not the Treaty of San Stefano been so swiftly undone by the berlin congress . In the event, it was not until the balkan wars of 1912–13 that Ottoman control ended. At that point Macedonia was partitioned largely between the Greeks and the Serbs. Bulgaria retained only more limited gains, and even these were soon reduced at the end of world war i under the terms of the neuilly treaty. Though during the inter-war years the Bulgarians were unsuccessful in their attempts to seize more of the region, world war ii gave them the opportunity to occupy not only the eastern portion of Greek Macedonia but all of what had now been converted from Serbian to Yugoslavian Macedonia as well. However, the 1947 paris treaty eventually restored Bulgaria's pre-war (1941) frontiers. Within yugoslavia's portion of the region tito's postwar constitution permitted the creation of a subsidiary Federal Republic of Macedonia (see federalism [1]), with ... log in or subscribe to read full text