Until 1913 the majority of the Slav population of all three parts of the wider region of Macedonia had Bulgarian identity [REF].
In the period 2002-2016 some 70,000 citizens of Republic of Macedonia have acquired Bulgarian citizenship (which represents more than 5% of the self-declared ethnic Macedonians in the country in the 2002 population census), almost all of them acquired by descent and always on 1st position by acquired citizenship per country.