Macedonia (Greece)
Macedonia (; , "Makedonía" ) is a geographic and former administrative region of Greece, in the southern Balkans. Macedonia is the largest and Greek region, with a population of 2.38 million in 2017. The region is highly mountainous, with most major urban centres such as Thessaloniki and Kavala being concentrated on its southern coastline. Together with Thrace, and sometimes also Thessaly and Epirus, it is part of Northern Greece. It also contains Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic region of Greece.
Demographic history of Macedonia
After the Fall of Communism and a brief upsurge of Macedonian nationalism at the beginning of the 1990s, sometimes resulting in clashes between nationalist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and ethnic Macedonian separatist organization UMO Ilinden-Pirin, the commotion has largely subsided in recent time and the ethnic Macedonian idea has become strongly marginalized. A total of 3,100 people in the Blagoevgrad District declared themselves Macedonian in the 2001 census (0.9% of the population of the region).