A new country was born today! Send your cigars and balloons to the Republic of North Macedonia in Europe. It had tried calling itself “Macedonia” since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s (remember that?) but neighboring Greece didn’t like that and the disagreement occasionally led to armed conflict near the border of the two countries. Crazy.

Even crazier is the Greeks kinda had a reason to be miffed about the use of the name. Ancient Macedonia, home of Alexander the Great, his lesser-known but equally war-thirsty dad Philip II and others, was actually mostly located in modern-day Greece. Thus, most ethnic Greeks consider the terms “Macedonian” and “Greek” to kind of be interchangeable. However, when Yugoslavia broke up after the fall of the Soviet Union, all kinds of new countries were formed, and several Slavs and Serbs just north of Greece decided the place they lived should be called Macedonia, too. 27 years later, we’ve arrived at a compromise that apparently everyone’s more or less happy with “North Macedonia.” TO THE LINKS!