Edirne During World War I: Borderlands and Belonging at the End of Empire

Even though the Treaty of Constantinople between the Ottomans and the Bulgarians was signed at the end of Balkan Wars in September of 1913, the Western borderlands of the Ottoman Empire were not settled until after the arrival of the new war. Arguing that Edirne and its environs, the Eastern Thrace, was a borderlands territory in the early 20^th century, this paper shows the negotiations between the Ottomans and the Bulgarians on the refugee and resettlement issues continued until the start of the World War I and were not finalized until after the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. The status of the Bulgarians who migrated out of the regions that stayed within the Ottoman Empire after the Balkan Wars and of the Ottoman Muslims who migrated out of the regions who stayed within Bulgaria was not formally decided until the 1925 Ankara Agreement between the newly established Turkish nation-state and Bulgaria.

Utilizing Ottoman diplomatic and military correspondences, this paper provides an examination of the Ottoman-Bulgarian border disputes that transpired after the Balkan Wars and continued during the First World War. The issues for both governments went beyond setting up territorial boundaries and involved addressing contested identities of displaced individuals from the region, sorting out the practicalities of resettling refugees from the war and even issuing passports to the refugees who wished to return. This paper also analyzes the cases from other local non-Muslim communities, namely the Ottoman Armenians and Greeks, and show how the Ottoman policies during the First World War shaped and complicated the diversity of the Thracian borderlands. It particularly highlights the Ottoman use of violence and the utilization of the language of violence in the borderlands of the Ottoman Empire in its last years.