Ottoman troops who suppressed the Ilinden uprising by Macedonian nationalists that broke out in 1903 posed proudly with the heads of the rebels they had killed by beheading in front of them.

   Ottoman troops who crushed the Ilinden uprising by Macedonian nationalists that broke out in 1903 posed proudly with the heads of the rebels they had killed by beheading in front of them. They fought tirelessly to liberate Macedonia, which had been under Ottoman rule. Beheadings were highly valued in medieval Europe. In the 20th century, beheadings were perceived as inhumane and barbaric by Western civilization. Today, capital beheadings were only carried out in the Middle Eastern countries of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran.

　In August 1903, the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie uprising broke out. About 26,408 rebels fought a life-or-death battle against some 350,000 Turkish regular and irregular troops. After about three months of resistance, the uprising was crushed in blood. About 994 rebels were killed or wounded in battle and 4,694 civilians were killed. The Ottoman army suffered about 5,328 killed and wounded in battle.　

　As the power of the Ottoman Empire declined in the 19th century, nationalist ideology spread, causing unrest throughout the Balkans. Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and others established their own schools and built ethnic identity based on language. The Bulgarian and Serbian Orthodox Churches became independent from the Greek Orthodox Church. Slavs in the Balkans were able to go to churches that preached in Slavic rather than Greek. The concept of nationality began to emerge in the Balkans: as a result of uprisings and wars in the 19th century, the kingdoms of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria became independent from the Ottoman Empire. Macedonia remained within the territory of the Ottoman Empire.

　In 1893, Slavic revolutionaries living in Macedonia in the Ottoman Empire founded the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO), a political revolutionary organization that aimed for the independence of the Macedonian region and its inhabitants. the VMRO was open to any resident of the Macedonian region, regardless of ethnicity or religion, but was mainly With the establishment of the VMRO, a new Macedonian ethnicity was created, separate from the Bulgarian and Greek ethnicity that had been established on the basis of linguistic and religious divisions.

　The VMRO launched a massive uprising against the Ottoman Empire in 1903. It was called the Ilinden Uprising. The Ilinden Uprising spread throughout Macedonia. It was quickly crushed by the Ottoman army, and the VMRO split into two groups: one that continued to insist on Macedonian independence, and a more radical group based in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, that sought to annex the country to Bulgaria.

　In the 1910s, the Balkans were embroiled in wars, including the First World War. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, with the loss of all but the territory of the modern Republic of Turkey, brought major changes to the entire Balkan Peninsula; in 1918, with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which dominated Central Europe, the southern tip of the Ottoman Empire, populated primarily by Slavs, united with the Kingdom of Serbia, Kingdom of Yugoslavia was established. With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia was divided, with the territory of the modern Republic of North Macedonia becoming part of Yugoslavia, the southern part of Macedonia becoming part of Greece, and the northwestern part becoming part of Bulgaria. Under Yugoslavia, the territory of Macedonia was renamed South Serbia, and the language was considered a Serbian dialect.

　After World War II, in 1946, the Socialist Republic of Macedonia was established as one of the six states comprising the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on the territory of the modern-day Republic of North Macedonia. Apart from the Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek churches, a Macedonian Orthodox church was also established. A national consciousness was created in the new country, and the inhabitants of Macedonia, which fell on the territory of Greece and Bulgaria, were gradually assimilated into their respective nationalities.