THE NATIONAL CATASTROPHES

The Turkish government threw a 350,000-strong regular army against the insurgents and tens of thousands of bashibozouks. The insurgents fought courageously for a long time in spite of the numerical superiority and modern armament of the enemy. It took the Turks a month to suppress the uprising in the Strandja district, the closest to the Ottoman capital, while the insurgents in Macedonia, who had been joined by thousands of volunteers from the Principality, withstood the Turkish troops in incessant bloody battles for more than three months. The revenge of the Ottoman Turks was dreadful: over 250 inhabited places were razed to the ground, thousands of insurgents and civilians were killed, over 10,000 people were left homeless and 50,000 sought refuge in the Principality.

THE NATIONAL CATASTROPHES

After the defeat of the Ilinden and Preobrazhenie Uprisings the ruling Bulgarian circLes finally oriented themselves towards the preparation for a war, in order to settle the Bulgarian national question. Taking advantage of the developments in Turkey, where the Young Turks’ revolution had broken out on September 22, 1908 the Bulgarian government proclaimed the country’s in-dependence, which until then had been vassal to the Em-pire. In 1912, under Russian auspices, the Balkan Alliance was set up, consisting of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, which waged a successful war against Turkey.

Immediately after the victory, however, sharp contradictions broke out among the allies. It turned out that the Bulgarian ruling circles had paid little attention to the diplomatic preparations for the war — the treaty with Greece had not treated territorial questions at all, while the one with Serbia had given grounds to the Serbian govern-ment to have claims for additional Bulgarian lands. The treaty had specified the northwestern part of Macedonia as a ‘debatable zone’ whose destiny was to be decided according to the concrete contribution of the two sides to the war against Turkey and depending upon whether Serbia would receive an outlet on the Adriatic. The Russian King had been named arbitrator.