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Република Македонија |
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Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia |
Location, political and cultural history
The most southerly fragment of the former Yugoslavia, the Republic of Macedonia, is a landlocked country bordered by Greece, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia and Bulgaria. The official language is Macedonian (македонски јазик), which is mutually intelligible with Bulgarian and like Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic - but with local variations.
It is important to distinguish between the Republic of Macedonia and the neighbouring Greek province of Macedonia; hence the rather lengthy name “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” which is sometimes abbreviated to FYROM.
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The left-hand map shows FYR Macedonia in relation to other fragments of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. To identify the other fragments, please visit our Yugoslavia index page.
The right-hand map shows the current boundaries of FYR Macedonia itself. |
The history of Macedonia since about the year 1018 broadly tallies with that of the other southern fragments of Yugoslavia, with one notable exception - Macedonia remained at peace through the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. However, it was seriously destabilised by the Kosovo War in 1999, when an estimated 360,000 ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo took refuge in the country. Although they departed shortly after the war, Albanian radicals on both sides of the border took up arms in pursuit of autonomy or independence for the Albanian-populated areas of Macedonia. This resulted in a civil war fought between the government and ethnic Albanian insurgents, mostly in the north and west of the country, between March and June 2001. The war ended with the intervention of a NATO ceasefire monitoring force, which stood down on 31st March 2003.
The result today is an ethnic and cultural mix that includes a significant proportion of muslims - one third of the population. Thus FYROM has the fourth largest muslim population in Europe by percentage, after Kosovo (90%), Albania (70%), and Bosnia-Herzegovina (48%).
Circumcision in FYR Macedonia
As in other Balkan countries, the muslims circumcise whilst the rest of the population do not (the Jewish population is negligible, having been wiped out during the Second World War). That said, the Macedonians have achieved somewhat better inter-relations between their differing religious and cultural groups than is the case in other fragments of the former Yugoslavia, especially Bosnia and Kosovo, so the whole matter of cultural norms deriving from religious belief is that bit less contentious.
Acknowledgements
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