Bulgaria was the first country to recognize the independence of the Republic of Macedonia, it has not recognized Macedonian as a unique language since it reversed its recognition of the language and ethnic group in the late 1950s. This was a major obstacle to the development of diplomatic relations between the two countries until a compromise solution was worked out in 1999. Greek views From the Greek point of view, there is only one true meaning for the term Macedonia, and that is in reference to ancient Macedon and the modern Greek region of Macedonia. Therefore Greeks were objecting to the use of the "Macedonian" name in reference to the modern Slavic language, calling it "Slavomacedonian" (), a term coined by some members of the Slavic-speaking community of northern Greece itself and used by Georgi Pulevski in his book "A Dictionary of Three languages". Demetrius Andreas Floudas, Senior Associate of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, explains that it was only in 1944 that Josip Broz Tito, in order to increase his regional influence, gave to the southernmost province of Yugoslavia (officially known as Vardarska banovina under the banate regional nomenclature) the new name of People's Republic of Macedonia. At the same time, in a "political master-stroke", the local language - which was until then held to be a western Bulgarian dialect - was unilaterally christened "Macedonian" and became one of Yugoslavia's official languages. Greece similarly rejects the former name "Republic of Macedonia", seeing it as an implicit territorial claim on the whole of the region. Books have been published in Greece which purport to expose the alleged artificial character of Macedonian. On 3 June 2018, the Greek Minister of Shipping and Island Policy Panagiotis Kouroublis, acknowledged that Greece had fully recognized the term "Macedonian language" for the modern Slavic language, since the 1977 UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, a fact confirmed on 6 June by the Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, who stated that the language was recognized by the New Democracy-led government of that time. Kotzias also revealed classified documents confirming the use of the term "Macedonian Language" by the past governments of Greece, as well as pointing out to official statements of the Greek Prime Minister Evangelos Averoff who in 1954 and 1959 used the term "Macedonian language" to refer to the South Slavic language. New Democracy denied these claims, noting that the 1977 UN document states