This paper examines what happened to the “abandoned land,” once settled by Crimean Tatar and Circassian refugees, in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania after 1878. Between 1860 and 1877, the Ottoman government resettled several hundred thousand refugees from Crimea and the North Caucasus in the northern Balkans. Danube Province, which stretched from southern Serbia, through Bulgaria, to eastern Romania, was one of the largest resettlement provinces in the empire. Following the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78, almost all Circassians and many Crimean Tatars fled with the retreating Ottoman army and were prevented from returning to their homes by the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian governments after the war. The lands vacated by Muslim refugees became a prized commodity in the three newly independent or autonomous countries. All three national governments passed legislation in 1880 to appropriate the land as state property. This paper argues that, first, the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian governments used the “abandoned land” for internal colonization by co-ethnic immigrants, in the process homogenizing their border regions, and, second, that Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania largely upheld the Ottoman land regime, building their new land legislation upon the Ottoman Land Code of 1858. The “abandoned land” became a state tool to repopulate different regions with Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Wallachian, and Moldavian peasants, many of whom were refugees themselves. Meanwhile, the lands in question were often contested by local populations, who had pre-1860 claims on the land. Muslim refugees, now based in Anatolia, also attempted to claim compensation for their lost properties, through the mediation of the Ottoman government. By focusing on contested agricultural lands, this paper contributes to the study of the political economy of Ottoman and post-Ottoman migrations.