Joy here; misery there—neither guaranteed permanent
As soon as an armistice was agreed, a peace conference in Bucharest went into action, beginning on July 30. (The fighting had lasted 33 days.) The belligerents’ representatives did all the negotiating, though the powers kept a watchful eye on them through their ambassadors in Romania. As Hall puts it, “they did not dominate the proceedings, but they did remain very influential.”
When the Ottomans asked to participate, Romania rejected the request, declaring that this was a matter to be decided among the Balkan states. Bulgaria had to wait until the Bucharest negotiations were finished and then negotiate separately with the Turks.
When the Ottomans asked to participate, Romania rejected the request, declaring that this was a matter to be decided among the Balkan states. Bulgaria had to wait until the Bucharest negotiations were finished and then negotiate separately with the Turks.
In the end, Serbia kept the entire watershed of the Vardar, and the border ran along the mountain range that separated this from the watershed of the Struma. Just below the mountains, however, Bulgaria was given a little piece that extended far enough westward to include the city of Strumica, a gesture that the Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pašić, said he was willing to make “in honor of General Fichev,” the head of the Bulgarian general staff, who was a member of the delegation.
The Bulgarian negotiators did no better with the Greeks. They knew that Salonika was lost. Their force there (which the government had kept in place contrary to its generals’ advice) was just big enough to annoy the Greeks, but was quickly overwhelmed on the first day of the war. The Bulgarian delegation hoped for Kavala, the second biggest Macedonian seaport, which Venizélos had offered them before the war, but his response contained more realism than warmth. He told General Fichev “Before [June 29] we were afraid of you and offered you Serres and Drama and Kavala, but now when we see you, we assume the role of victors and will take care of our interests only” [quoted by Hall]. The cities he mentioned are visible on the map above. All are west of the Struma, which Venizélos may have been considering as a Greek-Bulgarian border in southern Macedonia. But whatever he meant to offer, that was then and this, obviously, was now.
On either map you can see the Serbian-Bulgarian border settlement described above, and also the new eastern boundary between Greece and Bulgaria, fixed at a river that the Greeks called Néstos and the Bulgarians Mesta. This river is the traditional boundary between Macedonia and Thrace, so all of coastal Macedonia was now in Greek hands. East of that boundary, Bulgaria still had 70 miles of Aegean coast—something it had previously possessed for only the 15 months between the Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin, 35 years earlier—but the part they had now was relatively undeveloped. The closest thing it had to a seaport was the town of Dedeagach, Turkish for “grandfather tree.” (It was said to be named for a wise old dervish who at some time in the past used to spend his days in the shade of a certain tree there, and was eventually buried next to it.) Picturesque legend aside, the town was far less of an asset than Kavala.
The Bulgarians had to sign the treaty, but they regarded it as a disaster. They refused to consider the settlement permanent, and Hall quotes Tonchev, the head of their delegation, as saying “Either the Powers will change it, or we ourselves will destroy it.”
Greece also signed a bilateral peace treaty with the Ottoman empire. The Treaty of Athens was a cut-and-dried affair, little more than a formalization of the current state of things. Crete was formally ceded at last, along with Ioánnina, Salonika, and other territory the Greeks had acquired during the wars. Greece promised to grant minority rights to all Turks living within its new borders. The fate of the Aegean islands was still in the hands of the great powers, who finally awarded all but two, Imbros and Tenedos, to Greece. The Turks, who had insisted that the defense of Istanbul required that they possess Lemnos and Samothrace also, refused to yield sovereignty over them. There might have been another naval conflict if World War I hadn’t started when it did.
Bitterly disappointed by Russia, Bulgaria transferred its alienated affection to Germany. Russia, no longer able to count Bulgaria as a Balkan ally, moved closer to Serbia—although that country’s geographical position would make it a less useful ally in the future wars with the Turks that Russia (still lusting for Constantinople) fully expected to fight. Only one year later, Russia’s support for Serbia in the aftermath of the assassination at Sarajevo played a large part in turning a Balkan dispute into the First World War, and Bulgaria’s ties with Germany brought it into the war on their side—allied, ironically as it would seem, with the Ottomans.
In fact, though, Bulgaria’s chagrin over its losses caused the government to begin talking to the Turks about an alliance almost as soon as the Treaty of Bucharest was signed. It was clearly the only possible means of reversing their losses to Serbia and Greece. Though the talks produced no definite result, Bulgaria wasn’t at all reluctant to fight side by side with the Ottoman empire in alliance with the central powers. During the Great War, they took advantage of Serbia’s defeat to seize the part of Macedonia the Serbs had annexed.
Bulgaria did reoccupy what it considered its rightful share of Macedonia and Thrace during World War II, but alliance with Nazi Germany proved to have been another in the sequence of bad decisions, and Bulgaria was again a loser.
Reflections
It can be argued that the Balkan wars did none of the nations who fought them very much good in the long run. The Treaty of Bucharest made Bulgaria the biggest loser in the short run, and this clearly had a malign influence on its choices of allies (and the consequences that followed those choices) in later wars.
Greece was a big winner, even though it had narrowly escaped a devastating loss in the Kresna Gorge at the very end. But their success in the Balkan wars played a part in tempting the Greeks into the Anatolian adventure that ended in the catastrophe of 1922, a national humiliation at least equal to that suffered by Bulgaria in 1913.
Serbia, the other big winner made it (as the foremost part of Yugoslavia) almost to the end of the 20th century before coming to grief, but the process of Yugoslavia’s disintegration both began and ended in conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, the product of an antagonism that’s easy to trace back to the Balkan wars, even though it may also have older roots. Macedonia is still disputing the ethnic identity of its Slavic components, and, like Kosovo, also has a substantial Albanian population jealous of its rights.
Turkey, ironically, may have gained more from losing the war than the Balkan nations gained from winning it. Defeat—not only in the Balkan wars, but also in World War I immediately afterwards—ultimately brought about changes in Turkey that included a redefinition of what kind of state it was, and from being an outmoded empire trying vainly to maintain its rule over foreign nations Turkey remade itself into a modern nation-state, and a fairly strong one at that. Of course this wasn’t achieved without a good deal of suffering on the part of the Turks themselves as well as other peoples with whom they came in conflict.
All of that said, however, it wouldn’t be right to conclude that the Balkan wars did no good for anybody, or that the modern nation of Turkey was the only beneficiary. As is inevitable in the world we inhabit, the truth is never that clear-cut. Every part of the former Turkey-in-Europe contained some people whose yearning for independence was satisfied or whose material well-being was improved by the result. Subsequent population exchanges, regardless of the pain they caused, put still more people on the side of this or that border where, in the long run, they really wanted to be. As we've seen, no perfect solution was ever possible.
It’s true that the leaders on all sides often behaved voraciously in one way or another, but we should balance that with the realization that their appetite for aggrandizement was, at least in part, founded on a genuine anxiety for their small countries’ survival. Surrounded by powerful and often unfriendly neighbors—sometimes each other, but also the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires—each small Balkan nation felt that it needed every human, natural and geographical resource it could acquire in order to fend off the genuine possibility of being wiped off the map.
National hopes were generally expressed in the form of grandiose visions like Greece’s Great Idea and its Serbian and Bulgarian counterparts. These dreams of restoring past glories regardless of any changes history had dealt out in the meantime understandably put modern observers off—at least, those without a personal reason to buy into any particular country’s vision. The Balkan dreamers saw the world through spectacles tinted by 19th-century romantic nationalism. To a certain extent, they couldn’t help viewing it in a way that our hindsight reveals as distorted and misguided.
A world without the competing interests that sometimes cause violent conflict has never been achieved. Possibly it can’t be achieved without a perfect stasis that’s incompatible with human nature and history. Of course that’s not a reason to give up trying to coexist in peace, or to deny or shrug off the evil we continually do to one another in spite of our imperfect attempts to do the right thing.
The Balkan wars offer many examples of such evil. They were probably the first in modern times to exemplify on a large scale the form of violence we’ve recently come to know by the name of ethnic cleansing (appropriately enough, a phrase born in the former Yugoslavia and first uttered in Serbo-Croatian). Irredentist nationalism always involves an idealized vision of an ethnically pure band of brethren suffering under tyrannous oppression. When the facts on the ground turn out not to correspond to this vision, the would-be liberator’s impulse is to rectify the situation by getting rid of whatever doesn’t support the ideal. Civilians become military targets. Atrocities are committed. The Balkan wars were certainly not exempt from this tendency, and no participant can claim a clean record.
Hall refers to a report issued after the wars by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was written, he says, by “a committee of seven men, one from each of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States and two from France,” who conducted a thorough investigation, visited battlefields and annexed territories, interviewed eyewitnesses and survivors. They found, and described in their report, revolting brutalities and atrocities committed by all sides. Hall’s quotation from their conclusion is perhaps the best seal to put on this topic:
Greece was a big winner, even though it had narrowly escaped a devastating loss in the Kresna Gorge at the very end. But their success in the Balkan wars played a part in tempting the Greeks into the Anatolian adventure that ended in the catastrophe of 1922, a national humiliation at least equal to that suffered by Bulgaria in 1913.
Serbia, the other big winner made it (as the foremost part of Yugoslavia) almost to the end of the 20th century before coming to grief, but the process of Yugoslavia’s disintegration both began and ended in conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, the product of an antagonism that’s easy to trace back to the Balkan wars, even though it may also have older roots. Macedonia is still disputing the ethnic identity of its Slavic components, and, like Kosovo, also has a substantial Albanian population jealous of its rights.
Turkey, ironically, may have gained more from losing the war than the Balkan nations gained from winning it. Defeat—not only in the Balkan wars, but also in World War I immediately afterwards—ultimately brought about changes in Turkey that included a redefinition of what kind of state it was, and from being an outmoded empire trying vainly to maintain its rule over foreign nations Turkey remade itself into a modern nation-state, and a fairly strong one at that. Of course this wasn’t achieved without a good deal of suffering on the part of the Turks themselves as well as other peoples with whom they came in conflict.
All of that said, however, it wouldn’t be right to conclude that the Balkan wars did no good for anybody, or that the modern nation of Turkey was the only beneficiary. As is inevitable in the world we inhabit, the truth is never that clear-cut. Every part of the former Turkey-in-Europe contained some people whose yearning for independence was satisfied or whose material well-being was improved by the result. Subsequent population exchanges, regardless of the pain they caused, put still more people on the side of this or that border where, in the long run, they really wanted to be. As we've seen, no perfect solution was ever possible.
It’s true that the leaders on all sides often behaved voraciously in one way or another, but we should balance that with the realization that their appetite for aggrandizement was, at least in part, founded on a genuine anxiety for their small countries’ survival. Surrounded by powerful and often unfriendly neighbors—sometimes each other, but also the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires—each small Balkan nation felt that it needed every human, natural and geographical resource it could acquire in order to fend off the genuine possibility of being wiped off the map.
National hopes were generally expressed in the form of grandiose visions like Greece’s Great Idea and its Serbian and Bulgarian counterparts. These dreams of restoring past glories regardless of any changes history had dealt out in the meantime understandably put modern observers off—at least, those without a personal reason to buy into any particular country’s vision. The Balkan dreamers saw the world through spectacles tinted by 19th-century romantic nationalism. To a certain extent, they couldn’t help viewing it in a way that our hindsight reveals as distorted and misguided.
A world without the competing interests that sometimes cause violent conflict has never been achieved. Possibly it can’t be achieved without a perfect stasis that’s incompatible with human nature and history. Of course that’s not a reason to give up trying to coexist in peace, or to deny or shrug off the evil we continually do to one another in spite of our imperfect attempts to do the right thing.
The Balkan wars offer many examples of such evil. They were probably the first in modern times to exemplify on a large scale the form of violence we’ve recently come to know by the name of ethnic cleansing (appropriately enough, a phrase born in the former Yugoslavia and first uttered in Serbo-Croatian). Irredentist nationalism always involves an idealized vision of an ethnically pure band of brethren suffering under tyrannous oppression. When the facts on the ground turn out not to correspond to this vision, the would-be liberator’s impulse is to rectify the situation by getting rid of whatever doesn’t support the ideal. Civilians become military targets. Atrocities are committed. The Balkan wars were certainly not exempt from this tendency, and no participant can claim a clean record.
Hall refers to a report issued after the wars by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was written, he says, by “a committee of seven men, one from each of Austria-Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States and two from France,” who conducted a thorough investigation, visited battlefields and annexed territories, interviewed eyewitnesses and survivors. They found, and described in their report, revolting brutalities and atrocities committed by all sides. Hall’s quotation from their conclusion is perhaps the best seal to put on this topic:
“The main fact is that war suspended the restraints of civil life, inflamed the passions that slumber in time of peace, destroyed the national kindliness between neighbors, and set in its place the will to injure. That is everywhere the essence of war.”