Historiography in North Macedonia

Historiography in North Macedonia is the methodology of historical studies developed and employed by Macedonian historians. It traces its origins to the 1940s, when SR Macedonia became part of Yugoslavia.

The first generation of Macedonian historians after WWII traced Macedonian ethnogenesis to the 19th century. However, after the Tito-Stalin split the relations between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria deteriorated, and Bulgaria vigorously began to deny the existence of a Macedonian nation and language which it had recognised in 1946. Thus an important break occurred and Macedonian historians traced the origins of a Macedonian nation and state further back in time, to the Samuel of Bulgaria and his Cometopuli dynasty medieval rule, which was appropriated as Macedonian rather than Bulgarian. After the Republic of Macedonia's independence from Yugoslavia and after the beginning of the Macedonia name dispute with Greece, Macedonian historiography carried the nation's origins back even earlier, to antiquity and to the ancient kingdom of Macedon with a particular emphasis on Alexander the Great.

In the field of historiography, communism and Macedonian nationalism are closely related. After the fall of communism, Macedonian historiography did not significantly revise its communist past, because of the key role played by communist policies in establishing a distinct Macedonian nation. The debates in North Macedonia concerning its relationships with Bulgaria and Greece have had significant impact on historiographic narrative in the country, introducing a new revisionist interpretation of the past. Macedonian historians consider as one of their main purposes is to assort the facts free from foreign manipulation and the alleged twisted views of the neighboring historiographies, and present them in a true light. Thus, Macedonian historians with the same principle as their colleagues in Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, make extreme efforts to present the Slavic Orthodox population of the region in the 19th and 20th century as Macedonian, regardless of what the written records say.

Via the medium of education, unsubstantiated historical claims have been transmitted to generations of students in the country, to conceal that many prominent Macedonians had viewed themselves as Bulgarians. The Skopje 2014 project, for example, promoted the idea of continuity of the Macedonian nation from antiquity until modern times. Some domestic and foreign scholars have criticized this agenda of negationist historiography, whose apparent goal is to affirm the continuous existence of a separate Macedonian nation throughout history. Diverging approaches are discouraged because of economic limitations, and researchers who express alternative views risk academic career obstacles and stigmatization as "national traitors". Typical for young historiographies like the Macedonian is to be obsessed with questions of the nation, since the formation of the national past is among the first rationales of modern historiography.