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Notes -
To be fair Macedonia had always been a fairly distinct region with its own ethnic religious makeup. It’s also where half the ruling class of the early Turkish Republic came from coincidentally including Ataturk himself who is from Thessaloniki (a Jewish-Turkish-Bulgarian city of historical Macedonia until Greeks took over and ethnically cleansed everyone else).
It’s not super clear to me why the current version of Macedonia is so anti-Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian perspective is that North Macedonia to them is a lot like what Moldova is to Romania, that is that it's an identity constructed in the past by a bigger power to strengthen their hold of the region.
Moldovans in general seem somewhat agreeable or at worst ambivalent towards the claim that they are Romanians, but the people of North Macedonia seem very invested in their new national identity. They've engaged in some weird historical revisionism over the years, and the Bulgarians have viewed this as a kind of erasure of Bulgarian history.
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