20th century wars
The First Balkan War: 1912. Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria teamed up to fight the Turks and liberate Macedonia. This war ended with Turkey’s influence dissolving. Serbian troops occupied Skopje (the capital of Macedonia, which, to this day, apparently, has a very Turkish feel to it: mosques, minarets, bazaars). The Greek army occupied their precious Salonika. And suddenly, Bulgaria found itself locked out of the region and couldn’t collect the spoils of war. Bulgaria completely believed that “Macedonia” was a fabrication. It belongs to Bulgaria. But Serbia and Greece ganged up on Bulgaria, and shut them out. In the aftermath of the First Balkan War, they attempted to wipe out all Bulgarian influence in Macedonia. Macedonia filled up with Greek or Serb publicists, who began bombarding the population with a propaganda war. “You are REALLY Serbs…” “No, you are REALLY Greeks…”
Not only was this a war of words, but it was also coercive and violent. The Serbs gave the Macedonians 24 hours to renounce their nationality and proclaim themselves Serbian. The Greeks did the same. People were murdered who refused to choose. The Bulgarian population in the country was terrorized. Bulgarian priests were given the choice: convert or die. Colonists from Serbia and Greece poured into the country. People in Macedonia pretty much spoke Bulgarian; however now the Serbs and the Greeks quickly started printing their own newspapers in their own languages, insisting that people bury their Bulgar tongue. Not even admitting that it could be a problem. To Greece, Macedonia was made-up. It was actually REALLY part of Greece, so the fact that everybody spoke Bulgarian in the country was something to be ignored and covered up.
Meanwhile, of course, Bulgaria, right next door, was enraged. They did not negotiate, they did not say “We are going to declare war on all of you”, they did not give any warning. On June 13, 1913, Bulgaria invaded Macedonia. This was the start of the Second Balkan War.
The Second Balkan War: 1913. This war did not last long. The Serbs and the Greeks helped each other out, reinforcing each other’s troops against the Bulgarians. The Romanians joined the war, on the side of the Serb-Greek alliance, and invaded Bulgaria from the north. The battle was over very quickly, with Bulgaria the clear loser. There was a peace conference a couple of months later, in which Bulgaria lost everything it had gained in the First Balkan War. It had gained an outlet to the Aegean, it had gained lands in Thrace, it had enveloped all of Macedonia. All of this was taken back. It was a humiliating defeat which would end up having global consequences.
World War I: Bulgaria enters the war on the side of Germnay and Austria-Hungary in 1915. Its main goal was (surprise, surprise) to gain back all of Macedonia from Serbia. (Okay, Bulgaria, I think it’s time to just let it go…) Serbia had allied itself with Russia, Great Britain, and France. The Habsburg army advanced through Serbia from the north while the Bulgarian army marched through Macedonia in the east. The Serbian army was trapped, with no backup supplies, no ammo, no vehicles. It was winter, too. The Serbs retreated into the freezing Albanian mountains. Robert Kaplan has this to say about that retreat: “It was one of history’s most harrowing winter retreats, ranking with those of Napoleon’s soldiers from Russia the century before and of Xenophon’s Greek troops from Mesopotamia in 401 B.C. into the mountains of Anatolia.”
The remnants of the Serb army had retreated to Albania’s coast on the Adriatic, where they were rescued and transported away to Corfu by French and Italian ships. We are talking about over 125,000 Serbians. This was a devastating defeat for them, humiliating, all of them fleeing for their lives from the Habsburgs and the Bulgarians.
So from then on, throughout the rest of World War I, trench warfare raged up and down Macedonia, with the French/Greek/Serb alliance, along with the British, warring against the Habsburgs and the Bulgarians. This trench warfare went on for over two more years. Then the war ended, with basically nothing changed for the Bulgarians: They lost all of Macedonia to the Serbs and the Greeks. All of these wars were like the movie “Groundhog Day” for Bulgaria. They kept starting wars to regain Macedonia, and they kept losing these wars, no better off than when they began.
World War II: This war, of course, was a reply to World War I. Nothing had been resolved, no one was at peace with the outcome, everyone was dying to just start the whole thing up again. And so they did. Bulgaria (whaddya know) joined up with the Germans so that they could crush the Serbs and take back Macedonia. So this time, the Germans occupied Serbia from the north, and the Bulgarians occupied Macedonia from the east. And, in typical “Groundhog Day” fashion, the Serb and Greek alliance (with the help of Britain) fought the hated Bulgarians, and drove them back to the “hated borders” established at the end of the Second Balkan War.
But before the Bulgarians were driven out of Macedonia, and before the Russians swooped in, making all of this irrelevant, the Bulgarians and their occupation troops in Macedonia, began a brutal process of “Bulgarization” of the Macedonian population. Now, one more voice was added to the clamor, trying to tell the Macedonians who they are: “You are Serbs…” “You are Greeks…don’t listen to them!!” “You are Bulgarians!” The Bulgarians were particularly savage in this arena. First of all, they gladly rounded up the Jewish population for the Germans and shipped them off. In all of the other wars, while all of these wackos were arguing over Macedonia, like kids playing tug-of-war on the playground, the Jews remained protected. There was no question. With World War II, the gloves came off.
Now this is interesting: Because of how the Serbs and the Greeks had behaved during the First Balkan War, there had always been a pro-Bulgaria sway to the Macedonian population. With World War II that tide turned. However, Macedonia did not sway back to the Serb or Greek side of the argument. They suddenly discovered their “Macedonian-ness”. They began to feel like Macedonians, rather than people separated from whatever homeland they related to. Now, this is a debatable matter. Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs all scorn this “Macedonian-ness”. It is made up, according to them. There IS no indigenous Macedonian culture or identity. It is all Bulgarian, or Serbian, or Greek. But this fierce “Macedonian-ness” continues to this day.
With the madness of World War II, the Macedonians finally had HAD it with their country being invaded, chopped up, argued over. They went on the offensive, for the glory of “Macedonia”, and they demanded territory back from Bulgaria and Greece.
Skip ahead to 1989, and the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation: Macedonia feels cheated. Macedonia is pissed. There are huge populations of Macedonians who live outside their borders, in Bulgaria, or Greece. They want to liberate their countrymen. They want to be united with their kind. This is the dangerous powder keg sitting here in the Balkans. It is just a matter of time before it ignites. These people are used to hating. They have long long memories, and they NEVER forgive.
And it seems, too, that the Macedonians are slipping off into fantasy-land a bit. They have rediscovered a Macedonian language, which is, basically, a version of Bulgarian, but they can’t call it that, because then they would have to admit that their ethnicity is a mix. This is unacceptable. They believe that Istanbul was once a part of Macedonia, etc. All these other fantasies about that beautiful and perfect time in the past when Macedonia was not a victim of all of these greater forces, but the victimizer.
And I’ll close with a quote from Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, my primary source for all of this.
And on the walls near the Greek Consulate in Skopje [capital of Macedonia], I noticed the grafitti: ‘Solun is ours!’
Solun is the Macedonian word for Salonika, Greece’s second largest city. Such demonstrations of irredentism were to unleash a wave of hostility in Greece — so much so that, even when the new Macedonian state that declared its independence from Yugoslavia officially renounced all claims to Greek territory, it still wasn’t enough for the Greeks, who feared that the very word Macedonia on the lips of these Slavs was a sign of future irredentism against Greece. When Greece demanded that Macedonia change its name in order to receive official recognition from Greece, the rest of the world laughed. The heart of the Greek argument, however, was better explained in the articles written by the scholar Kofos than it ever was by the Greek government through the media. Kofos writes that Macedonianism was an invention of Tito to serve as a cultural buttress against Bulgaria, which coveted the area. According to Kofos, this part of former Yugoslavia is actually southern Serbia. True, perhaps; but rightly or wrongly, these Slavs now consider themselves Macedonians, not Serbs, and both the Greeks and the Serbs must come to terms with that fact.
The upshot of this mess is that the Balkans have, in the 1990s, reverted to the same system of alliances that existed in 1913, at the time of the Second Balkan War: Greece, Serbia, and Romania versus Bulgaria and the Slavs of Macedonia.
The boomerang of history.
