The Republic of North Macedonia is a country in the Balkans region of southeast Europe, with Skopje serving as its capital. North Macedonia is located in the greater Macedonia region of the Balkans, and North Macedonia was a part of the Kingdom of Paeonia until the sixth century BC, when it was conquered by the Persian Empire. In 479 BC, following the failure of the Greco-Persian Wars, the Persians abandoned Europe, leading to the kingdom of Macedon annexing what is now North Macedonia. The Roman Republic conquered Macedon in the second century BC and transformed Macedonia into a province, and it was a part of the Roman and Byzantine empires for centuries. During the 500s AD, the Slavs began to raid into Macedonia, and it was contended between the Bulgarian, Byzantine, and Serbian empires for centuries. From the 14th to early 20th centuries, the region was under Ottoman control, but modern Macedonia came under Serbian rule during the Balkan Wars of the early 1910s. During World War II, North Macedonia was briefly annexed by Bulgaria, as most residents of North Macedonia were culturally Bulgarian. However, it returned to Yugoslavia in 1945, and it existed as the Socialist Republic of Macedonia until 8 September 1991, when it became independent during the Breakup of Yugoslavia. The new country, calling itself "Macedonia", had a naming dispute with Greece to the south, as the Greeks objected to the Slavic appropriation of their Macedonian ancestors' history; the country was informally known as the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" as an alternative. The dispute led to the June 2018 Prespa Agreement, under which Macedonia decided to rename itself to "North Macedonia", which it did on 12 February 2019. In 2017, Macedonia had a population of 2,103,721 people.
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