hellenes without borders
The Balkans before the Balkan Wars

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A century ago last month (October 1912), the Balkan Wars began. It may be worthwhile to look back at the Balkans before the Balkan Wars to remind ourselves how much these two conflicts changed the destiny of Greece.

September 1912

As the summer faded into fall a century ago, the Balkan Peninsula was a very different place than today. One glance at the map tells us this. Greece ended at Arta, in Epirus, and at the footholds of Mount Olympus, not yet touching beloved our Macedonia. In the Aegean, east of the Cyclades and the Sporades, the islands were Turkish-controlled, though Samos was an autonomous, Greek-governed principality. In Constantinople and Asia Minor, up to three million Greeks lived often prosperous lives as Ottoman subjects, unaware of their precarious future. In the southeast Aegean, Italy had occupied Rhodes and the other Dodecanese Islands in the course of their recent war with Turkey. To the south, the “Great Island” Crete, which had a half dozen revolutions to unite with the Greek motherland since 1821, also existed in a netherworld of autonomy; though the Cretans declared union with Greece in 1908, nobody recognized the act. A Cretan at Greece’s premiership, Eleutherios Venizelos, was determined to change this.

To the north, geographical Macedonia, Epirus, Thrace, Kosovo, and Albania all remained Ottoman provinces, seething with unrest and an absolute goulash of nationalities: Greeks, assorted Slavs, Turks, Albanians, Vlachs, and Jews. Albania did not exist, and Serbia and Bulgaria both ended considerably north of their current frontiers (though in Serbia’s case, most of her gains have been wiped away by the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s). Far from cooperating, the three principal Balkan Orthodox states had been at each other’s throats in Macedonia, and within living memory Serbia and Bulgaria had fought a bitter war. The Turks did their best to exploit the Balkan states’ division by encouraging, well, Balkanization.

All three states had tried to tangle with Turkey on their own and suffered crushing defeats, most recently Greece in 1897. Despite their enmity, the only way the Turk was to be evicted would be in concerted action. Bulgaria and Serbia formed an alliance in March 1912, with the intention to act in concert to fight the Turks, and to submit any territory in dispute to the Russian Tsar for mediation. Montenegro associated with this treaty via Serbia. Then Greece and Bulgaria concluded an alliance against Turkey in May 1912, based on each side controlling what Turkish territory they conquered and Bulgaria stipulated that their alliance did not include fighting on Greece’s side if war broke out over Crete. In September 1912, Greece concluded a similar agreement with Serbia, easier to honor because Greek and Serbian claims, unlike Bulgarian claims, scarcely overlapped.

Turkey concluded her hostilities with Italy in large part to face the greater existential danger from her feisty former subjects. That said, most European states reckoned that the Turks would defeat the Balkan League handily. They did not reckon on the Balkan states’ determination to free their co-nationals still within the Ottoman Empire, or the degree to which these small states had drilled their armies with the latest weapons, or that Greece possessed a navy far superior to that of the Turks in everything but tonnage.

On October 8, Montenegro declared war on Turkey, and legend has it that aged King Nicholas of Montenegro fired the first artillery shell. A few days later, the other Balkan states followed.

Alexander Billinis has spent a decade in international banking in the US and Europe, most recently in London. He is particularly interested in Greece's economic and cultural position in the Balkans. He has worked with companies invested in the Balkans, and is writing a travel-historical book about the post-Byzantine states of modern Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania.
©2012 NEOCORP MEDIA





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