Dobruja in the First World War

Dobruja, the land between the lower Danube and the Black Sea, was entirely Romanian before the war, but Romania had taken its southern part from Bulgaria only in 1913. That is why, when Romania entered the war in 1916, Bulgaria struck precisely here. Within a few months Bulgarian, German and Turkish troops under August von Mackensen occupied the whole region, and in 1918 the victors divided it among themselves. The defeat of the Central Powers gave it back to Romania.

A disputed land

Northern Dobruja, with Constanța, the country’s main port, had belonged to Romania for more than three decades. The southern part, which the Romanians called the Quadrilateral, they took from Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War, and the Peace of Bucharest of 1913 awarded them an area of more than 7,000 square kilometres with Silistra, Tutrakan and Bazargic, today’s Dobrich. The Bulgarians never accepted this loss. The alliance they concluded with Germany in Sofia in September 1915 allowed them to recover Dobruja if Romania went to war against Bulgaria or its allies.

The campaign of 1916

The military convention with the Entente promised Romania that Russian divisions would also cover Dobruja. On 27 August 1916 the first unit of the Russian 47th Corps of General Andrei Zayonchkovsky crossed the Danube, and with it came the Serbian Volunteer Division, formed from prisoners from the Austro-Hungarian army. There were far fewer Russians than the Romanians had wanted, however, and the whole Romanian war plan rested on the assumption that Bulgaria would not attack. Three Romanian divisions stood far apart at Tutrakan, Silistra and Bazargic.

On the night of 1–2 September the Bulgarian Third Army of General Stefan Toshev, placed under Field Marshal August von Mackensen, crossed the border along its whole length. On 6 September the fortress of Turtucaia surrendered and about 28,000 Romanians went into captivity. The Battle of Tutrakan shook the country and halted the Romanian offensive in Transylvania. The Romanians abandoned Silistra without a fight, and the troops in Dobruja were formed into a separate army under Zayonchkovsky. The front came to rest on a line from Rasova on the Danube to Lake Tuzla by the sea, south of the railway from Cernavodă to Constanța.

Mackensen’s second offensive began on 19 October. On 22 October the Bulgarians and Germans entered an empty Constanța, with smoke rising over its harbour, and a few days later the Romanians gave up the bridgehead at Cernavodă and the crossing over the Danube was cut. Mackensen left the Bulgarian Third Army with the Turkish VI Corps in Dobruja and moved the rest of his troops to the Danube, from where he struck at Bucharest. In December the Russians began to fall back too, and on 5 January 1917 the last of them crossed the Danube into Bessarabia. All of Dobruja except the Danube delta was in the hands of the Central Powers.

The war in Dobruja was also a war between neighbours. According to Bulgarian sources, as early as August 1916 the Romanian authorities began to intern local Bulgarians and Turks considered disloyal in the interior of the country, and the Bulgarian news agency BTA even writes of forty thousand civilians taken to camps in Moldavia. The Romanian historian Constantin Kirițescu, for his part, accused Bulgarian peasants of attacking soldiers and described looting in captured Constanța. The hospital of the Scottish doctor Elsie Inglis also passed through Dobruja with wounded Serbs.

The condominium and the return of the Romanians (1918)

The Bulgarians regarded all of Dobruja as theirs, but their allies had other plans. The Peace of Bucharest of 7 May 1918 gave Bulgaria southern Dobruja with a strip of the north, roughly up to the Rasova–Agigea line, and placed the rest of the region, as far as the Danube delta, under the joint rule of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. In return for agreeing to hand it to the Bulgarians, the Turks wanted lands on the Maritsa back. Disappointment in Sofia contributed to the fall of Radoslavov’s government in June 1918. Only at the end of September 1918 did the four Central Powers sign a protocol in Berlin that also handed the jointly administered zone to Bulgaria.

It made little difference. Bulgaria signed an armistice, and after Romania re-entered the war on 10 November the first Romanian units crossed into northern Dobruja. Soon a Romanian prefect was in office in Constanța, and the British chronology of the war records under 3 December 1918 that the last Bulgarian troops left Dobruja. In the southern part, inhabited mostly by Bulgarians and Turks, Romanian officials met with hostility, and order there was kept by the British 26th Division. The Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine of November 1919 confirmed the border of 1913, and all of Dobruja returned to Romania.