Macedonia Culture & Language

Macedonian, an Eastern South Slavic language spoken by about 1.7 million people and written in an adapted 31-letter Cyrillic with six letters of its own, is the official language; the 2021 census recorded 507,989 speakers of Albanian, with Turkish, Romani, Serbian, Bosnian and Aromanian behind it, and the country has no ethnic majority large enough to forget the others. Eastern Orthodoxy is the most practised religion at 46.1 per cent, almost all of it in the Macedonian Orthodox Church whose autocephaly is itself a recent settlement; Islam is the faith of most Albanians and Turks, and the Ottoman age left mosques, bazaars and baths.

Ohrid is the cultural capital by a distance: the literary school of 886 that gave the Slavs their alphabet, the 365 churches of tradition, Samuel's fortress, and a World Heritage listing from 1979 and 1980 that is both cultural and natural. Skopje's bazaar is the other pole, the largest Ottoman market in the Balkans still trading. The countryside keeps the oro line dance, the rakija and the monasteries, Saint Jovan Bigorski's carved iconostasis in Mavrovo among the finest.

The modern culture is a small country's argument with its neighbours over name, language and church, conducted mostly in good humour and settled, so far, by treaty.

Macedonian is the official language, written in a 31-letter Cyrillic that a Russian or Bulgarian reader will manage and a Latin-alphabet visitor should learn the shape of before arriving; Albanian is the language of about a quarter of the population and of Tetovo and the west, and Turkish, Romani, Serbian and Aromanian are all heard. English is common among the young and in Ohrid's and Skopje's tourist trade. Zdravo is hello, blagodaram thank you, and the Albanian faleminderit is welcome in the west.