Serbia promises Dojran and Gevgelija to Greece

The British chronology of the war records under 25 September 1915 that the Serbian government promised Greece Dojran and Gevgelija and undertook not to press claims to Strumica. It was a response to the dramatic situation in the Balkans. Bulgaria, secretly bound to the Central Powers for several weeks, had just begun mobilisation, and Austro-Hungarian and German troops were massing on the Danube. Serbia needed Greek help as never before, and Prime Minister Nikola Pašić was ready to pay for it.

An old Greek wish

The Dojran and Gevgelija area lay on the Greek–Serbian border fixed after the Second Balkan War in 1913. Gevgelija was the first station on the Serbian section of the railway running from Salonika up the Vardar, and the small town of Dojran lay on the lake of the same name, through which the border ran. The Greeks had long wanted to move the border north, to give better cover to Salonika and the railway. As early as January 1915 Eleftherios Venizelos, weighing up a British offer, reckoned in a memorandum to the king that acquiring this district of about a thousand square kilometres would make up half of Greece’s losses if it had to cede Kavala to the Bulgarians. Pašić, unyielding towards any demands concerning Serbian Macedonia, for a long time would not hear of it.

The price of an alliance

In the autumn of 1915 things looked different. Greece and Serbia were bound by an alliance of 1913, and the accompanying military convention provided that in the event of a Bulgarian attack Serbia would put 150,000 soldiers into the field against it and Greece 90,000. King Constantine I and the Greek general staff held that since Serbia, threatened from the north, could not fulfil its part of the agreement, Greece was not bound by it either. Venizelos, who on returning to power in August wanted to honour the obligations to the Serbs, therefore asked the Entente for 150,000 soldiers in place of the Serbs, and on 23 September brought about the mobilisation of the Greek army. Mobilisation did not, however, settle that Greece would go to war.

The territorial promise was meant to tip the balance. The Serbian historian Dušan T. Bataković, drawing on the dispatches of the Serbian minister in Athens, Živojin Balugdžić, writes that Pašić undertook to cede to Greece after the war a triangle by Lake Dojran and a triangle around Gevgelija, if the Greek army gave Serbia effective help. A further condition was the defeat of Bulgaria and the enlargement of Serbia elsewhere. The offer was later confirmed officially by the Serbian government in Niš. According to Bataković, it was the only time during the war that Pašić agreed to give up even a scrap of Serbian Macedonia. Strumica had belonged to Bulgaria since 1913, so the undertaking concerning it related only to the division of territory after a possible war with the Bulgarians.

To no effect

In those same days the Serbs wanted to strike at Bulgaria before it finished mobilising. The British and French held them back. They still hoped that Sofia could be won over, and above all they feared that a Serbian attack would give the Greek king a pretext to declare that the defensive alliance with Serbia did not apply. In any case the fate of Greek help was being decided not in Niš but in Athens, in the dispute between Venizelos and the king. At the beginning of October Constantine I dismissed the prime minister, and Greece remained neutral. When a few days later the Central Powers, and soon Bulgaria too, attacked Serbia, Pašić’s promise lost its meaning. The border around Dojran and Gevgelija remained as it had been drawn in 1913.