North Macedonia

Ohrid, with its Byzantine churches and its lake, was the seat of the first Slavic archbishopric; Clement and Naum founded a school there that spread Cyrillic writing. The town is sometimes called “the Jerusalem of the Balkans” for the density of its places of worship.

The heart of ancient Macedon from which Alexander set out, the region became Roman and then Byzantine. In the ninth century the school of Ohrid spread the Slavic alphabet and liturgy across Eastern Europe.

Ottoman for five centuries, the region was contested between Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece during the Balkan wars. It became a Yugoslav republic in 1944, the only one to gain independence in 1991 without armed conflict.

A three-decade dispute with Greece over the country's name blocked Euro-Atlantic integration until the Prespa Agreement in 2018. The country became North Macedonia in 2019, joined NATO in 2020 and awaits the effective opening of its accession chapters.