King Peter arrives in Salonika

On 1 January 1916 Reuters’ correspondent in Salonika reported that King Peter I of Serbia had arrived in the city. According to The Illustrated London News he came aboard a French destroyer. The seventy-one-year-old monarch was exhausted and in poor health. Reuters wrote that he was still “somewhat indisposed as a result of his recent severe exertions”. Since June 1914 power had been exercised in his name by the heir to the throne, Alexander, as regent, but for the Serbs and for the allies the old king remained a living symbol of a state whose entire territory was by now occupied by the enemy.

From Albania to Italy

Peter I crossed the mountains of northern Albania with the army and at the beginning of December reached Scutari. From there he went on towards the coast, to the port of San Giovanni di Medua, today’s Shëngjin. The London weekly The Near East wrote that the journey could have exhausted a much younger and stronger man, and at times the soldiers carried the king in a litter. According to the Italian historian Franco Favre, on 24 December Peter I and his suite sailed for Brindisi.

In Italy a palace at Caserta was reportedly placed at his disposal, but the king declined, because he wanted to share the fate of his soldiers, and decided to sail to Salonika. His physician, Dr Svetislav Simonović, told a correspondent of the Corriere della Sera that the king spent five days in Brindisi, often walked about the town, and that Italy’s kindness was a great comfort to him. A different picture emerges from the note made on 31 December by the President of France, Raymond Poincaré. According to his diary, Peter I kept away from the Italian authorities and merely told the Serbian minister in Rome that dignity demanded silence about the “unforgettable insults” he had suffered from agents of the Italian government. Serbian–Italian relations were tense at the time, because Italy laid claim to part of the eastern Adriatic coast. According to The Illustrated London News, the king made the last stage of the journey from Vlorë, where the Italians had been since December 1914. There too he received the Croix de guerre from the French.

On Greek soil

Salonika was then the allies’ main base in the Balkans. After the retreat from Serbian Macedonia the French and British divisions were digging in around the city in an entrenched camp, and only two days earlier the French commander, General Maurice Sarrail, had ordered the arrest of the Central Powers’ consuls. Formally, however, the city belonged to neutral Greece. According to Reuters, the Greek government sent the king a cordial welcome through the prefect of Salonika. The Italian Giornale d’Italia reported from Athens that Peter I had wanted to meet King Constantine I and ask him to honour his obligations to Serbia, but his entourage dissuaded him, fearing that a moving meeting would prove too great a strain for so weak and sick a man.

The Near East considered the king’s arrival a curious and far from trivial episode. It wrote that Peter I had come to Salonika not to return to the rule he had earlier handed to his son, but as the embodiment of the courage and determination of his nation. The weekly expressed the hope that the presence of the Serbian monarch on Greek soil would become a “golden bridge” by which Greece would return to its alliance with Serbia. In the first days of January the king received General Sarrail and the commander of the British forces, General Bryan Mahon, at the Serbian consulate. The fate of the remnants of his army, crowded on the Albanian coast, was still undecided.