Bulgarian-Greek neutral zone

The British chronology of the war records under 14 December 1915, that is, 1 December according to the Julian calendar, that the general staffs of Bulgaria and Greece concluded an agreement on a temporary neutral zone along the Greek frontier. It repeats the same entry under 19 December. The available sources do not give the exact day on which Athens accepted the Bulgarian proposal. It is known, however, that the press was writing about it as early as 11 December, and on 16 December announced that the agreement had been concluded. The date of 14 December therefore falls within these limits, and 19 December is most probably the day on which the news reached the British press.

The Bulgarians on the frontier

In the first half of December the Bulgarian army reached the Greek frontier along its whole length. In the west it took Bitola and Resen, and in the valley of the Vardar and at Lake Dojran it followed the retreating French and British, who were already crossing the Greek frontier. The old Bulgarian-Greek frontier, drawn after the Second Balkan War from Belasica to the mouth of the Mesta, was suddenly extended by the whole stretch of the former Serbian-Greek frontier, as far as Lake Prespa. On both sides now stood the troops of two states which only two years earlier had fought each other over Macedonia.

Nobody in Sofia or Athens wanted a new war. The government of Vasil Radoslavov sought to keep Greece neutral, while Athens feared that the Bulgarians, pursuing the Allies, would enter Greek Macedonia and never leave it. The Athens correspondent of the London Morning Post reported that if the Allies had to be pursued on Greek soil, this was to be done not by the Bulgarians but by the Germans, Austrians and Turks, so as not to inflame Greek public opinion. In the end the chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, decided to halt the offensive at the frontier. On 12 December the French learned from a secret Bulgarian source that the Bulgarians would stop two kilometres short of the frontier, except in the area of Dojran.

Two kilometres on each side

According to the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger, whose report from Sofia of 11 December was reprinted by the American press, the Bulgarian government proposed to Greece a neutral strip along the Greek-Serbian and Greek-Bulgarian frontiers, in which the troops of both states would keep a rifle shot’s distance from the border line. The Berliner Tageblatt wrote on 12 December of a strip 2.5 kilometres wide on each side. The newspaper recalled that such a zone had existed on the old Bulgarian-Greek frontier since the Bulgarian mobilisation, and the new proposal was to extend it to the former frontier with Serbia. It added that the agreement would not change the position of Germany and Austria-Hungary on a possible pursuit of the Entente troops onto Greek territory.

On 16 December an official communiqué was issued in Sofia. It stated that when, after the capture of Bitola and Resen, the Bulgarian armies approached the Greek frontier, the government in Sofia, wishing to avoid any incidents between the forward outposts and the Greek frontier posts, proposed the creation of a neutral zone by withdrawing the troops of both sides two kilometres from the frontier. Greece agreed, and the Greek minister of war instructed his authorities to cooperate with Bulgarian officers in marking out the strip. A few days later Prime Minister Radoslavov assured the correspondent of the Kölnische Zeitung that if the Bulgarians entered Greek soil, it would only be to drive the Allies out of it, and that they would then return behind their own frontier.

Neutrality two kilometres deep

The zone calmed the frontier for several months. Greek orders from the spring of 1916 recall that the neutral strip created “a few months ago by the mutual withdrawal of the Greek and Bulgarian troops” had guarded against incidents. When, however, the Allies began to push patrols from Salonika towards the frontier, the Germans and Bulgarians abolished the zone on several sectors and dug in on the frontier line itself, while the Greeks, not wishing to clash, pulled back their posts. In the spring of 1916 the troops of the Central Powers crossed the frontier and seized the Greek Fort Rupel in the valley of the Struma, which deepened the National Schism in Greece.