North Macedonia

Ohrid is the reason this territory matters in religious history out of all proportion to its size. Clement and Naum, disciples of Cyril and Methodius, settled here in the late ninth century and ran what is usually described as the first Slavonic university: a school that trained clergy in the Slavonic liturgy, refined the script and sent literate priests out across the Slavic world. The lake, the town and its churches are inscribed by UNESCO for both natural and cultural value, one of a small number of mixed sites anywhere.

The modern religious map is about two thirds Orthodox and about a third Muslim, and the division follows ethnicity rather than crossing it: the Muslim population is almost entirely ethnic Albanian and Turkish. That alignment is what made the conflict of 2001 possible and what the Ohrid Framework Agreement that ended it was designed to manage, through language rights, decentralisation and proportional representation rather than through anything explicitly religious.

Sufi orders remain active here in a way they do not in most of Europe. The Arabati Baba tekke at Tetovo, a Bektashi foundation of the eighteenth century, is the best known, and it has been the subject of a long dispute over ownership and use between the Bektashi community and the official Islamic Religious Community of North Macedonia.

Registration of religious bodies has been contentious. The state's refusal to register a small Orthodox body under the Serbian Patriarchate produced a European Court of Human Rights judgment against North Macedonia, and its leader was imprisoned, a case widely criticised at the time.

In 1967 the Macedonian Orthodox Church declared itself autocephalous, choosing the six hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the medieval Archbishopric of Ohrid to do it. No other Orthodox church accepted the declaration, including the Serbian Orthodox Church from which it had separated, and the result was that a body serving the great majority of a country's population spent fifty five years outside communion with the rest of Orthodoxy.

The practical consequences of that status are worth spelling out, because they are easy to underestimate. Its clergy could not concelebrate with clergy of any other Orthodox church. Its sacraments were not recognised. Its faithful travelling abroad could not communicate in an ordinary parish. It could not attend pan Orthodox gatherings. And the dispute was entangled throughout with the separate and equally long argument between Skopje and Athens over the name of the country itself.

The resolution came quickly once it came. In May 2022 the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople accepted the church into communion under the name the Archbishopric of Ohrid, restoring the medieval title and sidestepping the contested national adjective. The Serbian Orthodox Church, the mother church in the dispute, concelebrated with it in Belgrade and then recognised its autocephaly. Other churches followed.

The case is instructive about how Orthodox jurisdiction actually works. Autocephaly is not something a synod can simply assert; it is a status conferred by recognition, and the currency of that recognition is the willingness of other bishops to stand at the same altar. Fifty five years is how long the refusal lasted, and a change of name is what unlocked it.