Politicians should leave history to the historians, Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev declared after meeting with his Macedonian counterpart Gjorge Ivanov in Belgrade on Friday.

"We aren't going to make a comprise with history. Let historians tackle history. Politicians must work for the future, for the realization of joint projects," Plevneliev told reporters in the Serbian capital on the sidelines of a meeting of the Southeast Europe Cooperation Process (SEECP), as cited by Focus.

"We wish to build bridges. Let us leave historical facts to scientists," the Bulgarian President said, apparently referring to the "theft" of history of which Bulgarian historians and politicians accuse their colleagues in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.

On the sidelines of the SEECP meeting in Belgrade, Plevneliev also met with the President of Montenegro Filip Vujanovic, and the President of Moldova Nicolae Timofti.

Since the early Middle Ages, all the way to the first half of the 20th century, Macedonia and its Slavic population were considered part of the Bulgarian nation not just by Bulgaria but also by its neighbors and the international community.

The foundations of the contemporary Macedonian nation were invented in 1943-4 by Yugoslavia's  communists at a special congress that also proclaimed the creation of a Macedonian language and a Macedonian alphabet designed to differentiate the dialects spoken in the region of Macedonia from the Bulgarian language and to underline the creation of a distinct Macedonian national identity.

In the recent years, however, with the democratic transitions in the region, the "ethnic Macedonian" identity has been eroded, with dozens of thousands of citizens of the Republic of Macedonia receiving Bulgarian citizenship based on their Bulgarian origin.

Unlike Greece, which gets enraged by Macedonia's moves toying with the cultural heritage from the Antiquity period and is tangled with Macedonia in the notorious name dispute, Bulgaria's governments traditionally react to propaganda fits by Skopje with disregard, while the general public in Bulgaria accepts them with ridicule.

To the extent that Bulgaria has made any claims towards Macedonia, those have boiled down to the refusal to allow Skopje to hijack Bulgaria's historical heritage from the Middle Ages and the 19th century Revival Period.

Bulgaria was the first sovereign nation to recognize the independence of the Republic of Macedonia in 1992.

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