King Peter at Edipsos

The British chronology of the war records under 17 January 1916 the arrival of King Peter I of Serbia at Edipsos, a spa on the Greek island of Euboea. On that day the news went round the press, but the journey itself had taken place earlier. According to a Reuters dispatch from Athens dated 16 January, the King arrived at Edipsos “yesterday at six in the evening” aboard a French torpedo boat on which he had sailed from Salonika that same morning. He therefore most probably reached his destination on 15 January.

Edipsos, also transliterated from the Greek as Aidipsos, lies on the north-west coast of Euboea, on the gulf separating the island from the mainland. Its hot springs had been famous since antiquity. Plutarch wrote that the Roman dictator Sulla took the cure there. The seventy-one-year-old King, exhausted by the retreat through the Albanian mountains, came there to take the waters.

The news reaching from Greece suggested that the King’s condition was serious. In February a correspondent of the American Associated Press agency who visited him at Edipsos described Peter I as a man physically broken and almost blind, but with an unclouded mind and an unbending spirit. Of the Greeks, who had refused Serbia military assistance, the King spoke with restraint: “Today we are guests of the Greek nation and we are grateful for its hospitality.” He ended the conversation with the words: “I believe in the freedom of Serbia as I believe in God.”

The Serbian government and the army being rebuilt settled meanwhile on Corfu, but the King, as the London weekly The Near East reported in February, was not expected to appear there for at least another two months. In the end he spent over four months at Edipsos. According to the same weekly he left the spa at the beginning of June 1916, warmly seen off by the inhabitants, among whose poor he had distributed money, and went for the summer to Chalcis, the island’s chief town.