King Peter leaves Salonika

On Saturday 15 January 1916, at six in the morning, King Peter I of Serbia left Salonika aboard a French warship. He had spent barely two weeks in the city since he arrived there from Italy on 1 January. His destination was Edipsos, a spa with hot springs on the north-west coast of the island of Euboea. It had already been reported from Athens that the king had decided to take a cure there, because his health after the retreat through Albania was still very poor.

According to a Reuters dispatch from Athens, a short sea voyage followed by a journey by rail had been planned for him. The king decided, however, that a longer sea passage would tire him less, and made the whole journey on a French torpedo boat. By the evening of the same day he had arrived.

The day before his departure, 14 January, was the Greek New Year, celebrated according to the Julian calendar. On this occasion Peter I received a telegram from King George V of Great Britain. The British monarch wrote that he was “fully confident” that the allies, together with the heroic Serbian army, would succeed in regaining complete independence for his people. The British press stressed that the king had received words of encouragement. There was little good news at the time: Austro-Hungarian troops were just then occupying Montenegro, Serbia’s ally.

The king’s departure coincided with the relocation of the whole Serbian administration. That same day several dozen members of the Serbian government arrived in Brindisi, together with the ministers of the allied states accredited to the king, and according to a British chronology of the war the first Serbian soldiers landed on Corfu, where the allies had decided to rebuild the army. Peter I took no part in this. Since June 1914 affairs of state and of the army had been conducted in his name by the regent, Alexander, together with the Prime Minister, Nikola Pašić, and the old king, almost blind and worn down by illness, needed above all rest.