Its language and history give North Macedonia its identity for president Stevo Pendarovski, but for Bulgaria neither of them are real, in a dispute holding up EU enlargement.
"The mainstay of our identity is our language, after that, history, our shared history with our compatriots," Pendarovski told EUobserver in an interview.
"It's not a secret that we codified the Macedonian language in 1945, but it's a separate language, very close to Bulgarian, but it is not, and has not be...
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Andrew Rettman is EUobserver's foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.