By the summer of 1913, the lands of Macedonia ceased to be a part of the Ottoman Empire. The conquest of the region compelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims to take flight to Anatolia and resulted in the destruction of towns, villages and quarters associated with the region’s Muslim population. These aspects of the end of Ottoman rule in the Balkans are by no means unknown to scholars or the Turkish general public; one may say in fact that Macedonia’s annexation, as well as the departure of so many of region’s Muslims, possesses an Ur resonance within Turkey, constituting a definitive moment in the making of the modern republic and its people. Our contemporary understanding of the end of Ottoman imperium in Macedonia however is admittedly rather one-sided. Current scholarship has been relatively content not to pursue how the empire’s culture and administration was dismantled immediately following the Treaty of London of May 1913. While we are familiar generally with the plight of the region’s Muslim refugees, it remains largely unclear how Macedonia’s remaining inhabitants encountered and negotiated with the end of Ottoman rule. Lastly, it remains to be seen how Istanbul politicians and local Ottoman diplomats perceived Rumeli’s departure during the immediate aftermath of the war. The paper presented below represents an initial study of Macedonia’s political and social transition away Ottoman rule. Focusing on the years between 1912 and 1918, this paper delves into the diplomatic correspondence of British, Austrian, German and Ottoman observers present in the region during the empire’s collapse. The principle subject of this study is the region that came to be known as “Old Serbia” or what is today the lands of the Republic of Macedonia and Kosova. A preliminary survey of these records reveal three particular trends: 1) Macedonian Muslims struggle to stay in their homes and integrate into the emerging Serbian order; 2) the Serb administration of the region wavered between acts of oppression towards both Muslims and Exarchists and deliberate attempts to mobilize Muslim support and maintain the status quo; 3) through the First World War, Ottoman officials continued to monitor and bemoan the plight of Muslims. Continued official interest in Macedonian Muslim affairs tended to reinforce the established narrative of extreme Muslim suffering and exclusion at the expense of emphasizing Muslim acts of collaboration and similar hardships suffered by Greek and Bulgarian Orthodox Christians.

Ottoman authors produced a large corpus of writing during the Balkan Wars and in its aftermath. The unprecedented dimensions of the defeat and the following human catastrophe triggered journalists, veterans, authors and others to reflect on the wars in various publications that formed a distinct Ottoman "culture of defeat". Among the Ottoman authors stood out former POWs who were detained during parts of the war in POW camps in Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. For Ottoman readers, the plight of Ottoman rank-and-file POWs symbolized some of the worst cases of atrocities inflicted on Ottoman civilians and POWs during the Balkan Wars. However, Ottoman officers benefitted from much better conditions of captivity. According to international conventions in force, officers were detained in cities benefitting from limited freedom of movement during the day. This enforced sojourn in the major urban cities of the Balkan States made POWs, like the Ottoman author Râif Necdet [Kestelli], attentive observers of Balkan societies. After the end of the Second Balkan War some of these officers published their memoirs in the Ottoman press, and later as books. Their texts represent a particular category of the Ottoman writings on the Balkan Wars. While these texts are imbued with scenes of the Ottoman defeat and its ramifications, they also contain attempts to study the Balkan states from up close and to assess their success in the Balkan Wars. In my presentation I analyze the POWs' writings produced during the Balkan Wars against the context of the Ottoman public debate on the defeat, its causes and on the possible paths to secure a rejuvenation of the Ottoman nation. By comparing the texts written by ex-POWs with the writings of other Ottoman authors I will examine the particularities of their points of view and the POWs' specific contribution to the Ottoman perceptions of the Balkan Wars.

While largely understudied to date, those regions in the western Balkans inhabited by Albanian speakers were afflicted by the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 (and then World War I) in distinctive ways. The subsequent parceling out of these former Ottoman and Habsburg administered lands to satiate the needs of neighboring political and economic elite introduced a unique set of consequences for Albanian-speakers and the regimes that occupied these areas during the “long” World War I. While this paper will cover the battles between armies and the residual horrors accompanying war—famine and forced migration—in order to demonstrate how these material manifestation of imperial collapse became the twentieth century reality for most Albanians, this paper will argue that a violence that rips apart these regions have an equally dramatic impact on the manner in which the regimes occupying the area would transform with the sudden turn of fortunes. With Montenegrin, Greek, Serbian, Habsburg, Ottoman (and Bulgarian) administrations beginning a process of folding to new military defeats throughout the 1912-1917 period, this paper will suggest the resulting chaos invariably transformed these imperial administrations as they retreated from the region. At its theoretical heart, this paper wishes to suggest the manner by which locally administered regimes adapted to the shifting fortunes of larger imperial patrons influenced the manner these temporary regimes interfaced with new constituencies arising from these contested geographies inhabited by a politically scattered population. As these “Albanians” faced a future increasingly decided by outsiders charged with occupying Albanian lands under a new, often hostile ambition, the relationship former partners at the local and regional level, the nature of Occupation at crucial moments took on a crucial dynamic of productive tension. Crucially, these occupations often required considerable collaboration with selected local intermediaries, some of whom became the dominant political actors in Albanian lands for much of the 20th C, in large part because of these short-term adjustments taken by departing officials in what would soon-become (re)occupied Albania, Macedonia, and Kosovo under an entirely different kind of regime.

There has recently begun to develop a critical literature that re-assesses the late Ottoman history in an attempt to move beyond the domineering teleological approaches that have so long conditioned the late Ottoman history to the subsequent reality of nation-states. Teleological approaches essentially read the late Ottoman history, with knowledge of its outcome. Accordingly, the late Ottoman history has been tailored to explain its failures such as the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and the First World War in a narrative continuity that foreshadows the eventual success story of the resistance movement and nation-building process orchestrated by Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk in 1934). One significant component of this narrative is the Balkan Wars where the Balkan League comprised of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro defeated the Ottoman armies in late 1912, resulting in significant territorial losses on the part of the Ottomans despite a small-scale Ottoman reconquest that came by July 1913. This paper is an attempt to point out the teleological function that the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars has come to serve in the broader literature, whether nationalist or revisionist, and attempts to remedy it through a critical examination. In doing so, I hope propose an alternative framework to examine the impact of the Balkan Wars on the Ottoman elites and decision-makers in the absence of a teleological paradigm.