Kavala in the First World War

Kavala, a port on the Aegean in eastern Macedonia, lived on the tobacco trade and was one of Greece’s most disputed gains from the Balkan Wars. During the war it became a stake in the contest for Bulgaria: in 1915 the Entente offered to hand it to the Bulgarians if they entered the war on its side. In September 1916 the Bulgarians took it without a fight, when the Greek corps shut up in the town gave itself up to the Germans. The occupation lasted until the autumn of 1918, and in that time the people of eastern Macedonia suffered hunger and deportations.

A port disputed since 1912

In the First Balkan War Kavala was taken by the Bulgarian army, and in the second, in 1913, the Greek fleet took it from them. At the negotiations in Bucharest it was the issue fought over longest. Bulgaria wanted a good port on the Aegean, but the Treaty of Bucharest gave Kavala to Greece, and Bulgaria was left only with Dedeagach further east, which the British official history called an open roadstead.

The war gave the Bulgarians a new chance. In January 1915 Eleftherios Venizelos, weighing a British offer, was ready to give them Kavala in return for their entry into the war on the Entente’s side. King Constantine I would not hear of it. On 3 August the British minister in Sofia formally offered Kavala to the Bulgarians, and the Entente ministers announced “pressure” on Greece, which had just made Venizelos prime minister again. Bulgaria, however, chose Germany. In the treaty of alliance signed in Sofia it stipulated that if Greece sided with the Entente, Bulgaria could take from it the lands won in the Second Balkan War, Kavala included.

The surrender (1916)

In the spring of 1916 the Bulgarians and Germans took Fort Rupel on the Struma. The Allies feared that Kavala would be next, and from June they kept ships out of its harbour so that food would not fall into Bulgarian hands. In the second half of August the Bulgarians entered eastern Macedonia, and the government in Athens forbade the army to resist. On 24 August the commander of the Greek corps handed over the northern forts above the town to them, having first removed the breech-blocks from the guns.

Units of the Greek IV Corps remained in Kavala. On 10 September a German officer demanded the surrender of the town and the troops within 24 hours. That night panic broke out. About 2,000 soldiers with ten batteries managed to embark, and the rest, about 8,000 men, gave themselves up to the Germans on 11 September so as not to fall into Bulgarian captivity. They were taken to Görlitz in Silesia. On 12 September the Bulgarians entered Kavala, and a few days later the Allies declared a blockade of the whole coast from the Struma to the Mesta.

For Greece it was a shock. The Entente press accused the king of treason, and Venizelos, whom the loss of Kavala convinced to break with Athens, placed himself in Salonika at the head of the government of National Defence. The events in Kavala became one of the most tragic chapters of the National Schism, the rift that split Greece into two camps.

Occupation and return (1916–1918)

The Bulgarians, who regarded this land as theirs, ruled Kavala for two years. After the war, at the request of the Greek government, an inter-Allied commission examined the villages around Serres, Drama and Kavala on the spot, and its report was presented to the peace conference in May 1919. The Greek historian Areti Tounta-Fergadi quotes, after Georgios Ventiris, figures for the whole of eastern Macedonia: 30,000 dead, 42,000 people deported by the Bulgarians by force and 12,000 who went to Bulgaria of their own accord so as not to starve. Another 12,000 died in Bulgaria of hunger and privation.

The occupation was ended by the Vardar offensive. The armistice signed at Salonika on 29 September 1918 ordered the Bulgarians to leave the occupied Greek territory at once, without taking away cattle, grain or provisions, and to return the equipment of the IV Corps to Greece. By the end of October the Greek I Corps already stood between Kavala and Drama, and British transport was marching through the town eastwards, towards Dedeagach.