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His death was confirmed by an aide, Zivko Kondev.
Mr. Gligorov became president of Macedonia in January 1991 when it was still a Yugoslav republic. He led his countrymen through a referendum in which they voted for independence, and the territory of 2.1 million people became the only republic to secede from Yugoslavia without a war. He served two consecutive terms, leaving office in November 1999.
Severely injured in an assassination attempt in October 1995, Mr. Gligorov emerged from a roughly four-month hospital stay with deep facial scars. A bomb, which targeted his car as he headed to work in the capital, Skopje, cost him an eye and killed his driver and a bystander. No suspects were ever arrested.
The early days of Mr. Gligorov’s presidency were overshadowed by a bitter dispute with Greece over the newly independent nation’s name — a dispute that continues to this day.
Greece objected to the use of the name Macedonia, saying it implied territorial ambitions on its own northern province of the same name. It also objected to a symbol on the new country’s flag and articles of the Macedonian Constitution that Greece believed suggested territorial claims.
Greece imposed a crippling 19-month embargo on its northern neighbor. In 1995, the Macedonian government signed an accord with Greece agreeing to remove the symbol from its flag and revising some articles of the Constitution, but talks on the country’s name have made little progress. In official bodies such as the United Nations, the country is known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
Mr. Gligorov also faced domestic unrest, with the country’s large ethnic Albanian minority pressing for greater cultural and political autonomy.
The demands eventually boiled over into armed conflict in early 2001, about a year and a half after Mr. Gligorov left office. The two sides eventually signed a peace accord under which minorities were guaranteed greater rights, and NATO peacekeepers were sent to the country.
Born in the central Macedonian town of Stip on May 3, 1917, Mr. Gligorov graduated from law school in Belgrade and was working as a lawyer for a private bank in Skopje when World War II broke out. He joined the partisan movement fighting against the Nazi occupation from its early days.
He is survived by two daughters and a son. His wife, Nada, died in 2009.
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