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• 3 Nationality and Shifting Borders, 1912–1918 In November 1918 an unusual scene unfolded in the village of Dzhaferliı̆ (today Kichevo) north of Varna. Greek officers arrived in an automobile decorated with a Greek flag and convened a meeting with village elders. Headed by a confident colonel named Konstantinos Mazarakis-Ainian, a former Greek fighter in Macedonia and current head of the Greek Military Mission in Bulgaria, the officers inquired about the local church and school, and asked if the villagers had any complaints regarding the Bulgarian government . The Colonel explained that after the war Greece had become a great power, Bulgaria was expected to lose more territories, the Greek Navy would be sailing in the Black Sea, and everything would go well for the Greeks in Bulgaria. Mazarakis exclaimed: “Long live Greece!” and removed the portraits of King Ferdinand and Prime Minister Radoslavov from the mayor’s home. He assured the elders that he would pay “Greek silver” for requisitioned property not compensated by Bulgarian officials and promised to send a Greek teacher and priest to the villagers “if they wanted to become Greeks.” Mazarakis, however, faced several setbacks. The villagers were Gagauz, a Turkish-speaking Christian population that had recognized the Patriarchate until 1906 but had embraced the Bulgarian Church thereafter. The elders spoke no Greek, and the Colonel had to use an interpreter to communicate with them. He was particularly annoyed by his encounter with the Bulgarian priest Ottsev who was fluent in Greek but ignored suggestions to adopt that language in church services. The priest also challenged the Colonel on the thorny issue of Macedonia. When Mazarakis called him “a pure Greek” (chist grâk) because he was born in Macedonia, Ottsev responded that he was “a pure Bulgarian...educated in Greek but ordained...by the Exarchate.” The villagers also hesitated. Some confirmed that “they had 78 | Chapter 3 been Greeks several years prior” and welcomed a Greek school and priest. Yet others responded, “Whether under Bulgaria or under Greece, it is all the same, as long as [we are] not under Romania,” alluding to the border change in 1913 that assigned nearby southern Dobrudzha to Romania. Colonel Mazarakis concluded the meeting by remarking, “These people are true Greeks but they are afraid [to show it],” and thanked the multitude, through an interpreter, for being good patriots.1 The encounter between Mazarakis and the Gagauz villagers can best be understood in the context of the preceding six years, when the Balkans experienced the Balkan Wars and World War I. Shifting borders, successive administrations, competing educational and religious institutions, determined national activists, population exchanges, and national conversions marked the period between 1912 and 1918. The process of “ethnic unmixing ” associated with the breakdown of the multiethnic empires started earlier in the Balkans than in the rest of eastern Europe. In 1912 the First Balkan War inaugurated a period of ethnic cleansing in the entire region, which had disastrous consequences for a large number of Muslims (mainly Turks) who had fled Christian countries.2 The subsequent Second Balkan War and World War I also affected the Christian populations inhabiting the contested Ottoman territories of Macedonia and Thrace, which the Balkan countries were trying to split up. The shifting alliances and prolonged fighting from 1912 to 1918 led to numerous population movements in an attempt to purge disputed territories of unwanted minorities.3 As people fled their birthplace and new national bureaucracies replaced the old imperial system, the diversely populated Ottoman provinces underwent a turbulent process of becoming homogeneous national territories. This chapter examines how, as borders repeatedly shifted, officials implemented diverse policies of national homogenization and people faced fundamental changes in their collective identifications. Between 1912 and 1918 Bulgarian territory changed four times, and each of these territorial changes resulted in extensive population movements and nationalization campaigns.4 Many of the new inhabitants of the kingdom, previously accustomed to 1. TsDA, f. 176k, op. 3, a.e. 1382, ll. 25–26, 60. Priest Ottsev to the Bishop of Varna and Preslav, 23 November/10 December 1919; Varna District Requisitions Officer to MV, 31 December 1918. 2. From 1912 to 1920, according to official Ottoman statistics, some 414,000 Muslims migrated to Anatolia and Eastern Thrace from various territories in the Balkans (Macedonia, Thrace, Bosnia, and Albania); some 250,000 migrated in 1914 alone. See Justin MaCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, 1995), 156–164; Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic...

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