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16 “Wiping out the Bulgar Race” HATRED, DUTY, AND NATIONAL SELFFASHIONING IN THE SECOND BALK AN WAR Keith Brown Introduction This paper attempts an anthropologically informed reading of Greek military conduct toward Bulgarian civilians during the Second Balkan War of 1912–13. It draws on a set of accounts of atrocities allegedly authored by their Greek perpetrators, captured by Bulgarian forces, and reproduced and analyzed in the Carnegie Inquiry set up to investigate the causes and conduct of the Balkan Wars.1 Greek and pro-Greek scholars at the time strenuously denied the authenticity of the sources, in addition to accusing Bulgarian regular and irregular forces of worse atrocities over a longer period; outside observers found the soldiers’ narratives persuasive evidence of the region’s primitive passions.2 The incidence of contested narratives is, of course, hardly rare, in the Balkans or elsewhere . Nonetheless, this case—which, in the words of one recent commentator, “still awaits its modern scholarly researcher”—invites a treatment that draws on, and hopefully advances, ongoing and vibrant debates at the intersection of anthropology and history which stress the importance of critical and reflective attitudes toward both the particular facticity of documentary sources and the explicatory power of theoretical categories of ostensible sociocultural regularities.3 In that spirit, the reading offered here is “anthropological” not in the sense presumed by historian Jacob Gould Schurman, who made reference to the fluid connections between “anthropological” and “linguistic or political” units in the Balkans as one cause of the region’s turbulence, nor in the sense more recently invoked by military historian John Keegan, who in the early 1990s argued that the break-up of Yugoslavia was “a primitive tribal conflict only “Wiping out the Bulgar Race” 299 anthropologists can understand.”4 These authors see anthropology’s contribution to historical debates as limited to the so-called “primordial attachments”—what Clifford Geertz referred to as the “congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, [which] are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves.”5 What I offer here instead is an anthropological reading in the spirit of the interpretive turn that Geertz himself pioneered in that 1973 volume, where he emphasized that both the coerciveness of such attachments, and indeed the attachments themselves, are not simply “given”: their givenness is the product of cultural and/or historical processes which themselves demand interrogation. And this same spirit, I suggest, infuses recent anthropological work in and on archival material in which, in Ann Stoler’s words, “distinguishing fiction from fact has given way to efforts to track the production and consumption of facticities as the contingent coordinates of particular times and temperaments, places and purposes.”6 Here, then, I revisit and revivify a charged debate that was waged over and through a set of written materials produced in 1913, during the Second Balkan War, specifically letters purportedly written by Greek soldiers and captured by Bulgarian forces, which are preserved in the 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in the form of reprinted English translations, along with a facsimile of one of the original letters and its envelope.7 The letters describe a campaign of extermination by the Greek Army against Bulgarian civilians, in which soldiers violate girls, kill prisoners, and burn houses, all to try and “wipe out the race.”8 This paper explores previous readings of this material, moving beyond an investment in distinguishing “fact” from “fiction” to analyze their facticities and the different discursive domains within which they can be placed. The more familiar readings, as one might expect, serve to buttress well-rehearsed arguments about the Balkan Wars in particular, and Balkan character in general. I hope that the more ambitious readings here offer something new to the debate over the nature of Balkan history in highlighting the relationship between ongoing processes of nation formation in the region and ideas about warfare and racial hierarchy circulating elsewhere in Europe and North America at the time. A key trope, I suggest, is the concept of national duty: and I conclude by arguing that a focus on this aspect of the Balkan Wars offers a pathway out of an unproductive, continuously adversarial and predominantly “groupist” debate which spirals around ideas of ethnic hatred and claims of genocide.9 The Sources and Their Context The First Balkan War began in the first week of October 1912, when Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece all declared war on the Ottoman Empire and launched their armies against Turkish forces...

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