1919 Парис буюу дэлхийг өөрчилсан 6 сар 1-р хэсэг

his greatest speeches when the Ottomans had massacred them by the thousands. But by 1919, Bulgarians were seen in western Europe less as victims than as unreliable thugs.298 From the time it first came into existence as a modern state, Bulgaria had been fluctuating like a Balkan amoeba. In 1878 a huge, autonomous Bulgaria had emerged out of the Ottoman empire, reaching westward to the borders of Albania and down to the head of the Aegean. That was too much, both for its neighbors and for the Great Powers. Serbia grabbed much of Macedonia, and Greece western Thrace. The Ottomans managed to hang on to eastern Thrace. After a short-lived expansion in 1912, Bulgaria lost the southern Dobrudja to Rumania. Recovering the losses became part of the Bulgarian national dream, along with that golden age in the tenth century when Bulgaria touched the Adriatic in the west and the Black Sea in the east.

If the Rumanians were the Neapolitans of the Balkans, the Bulgarians, some five million of them in 1919, were the lowland Scots. Dour, hardworking, thrifty and taciturn, they had a reputation for stubbornness. As a local proverb had it, “The Bulgarian will hunt the hare in an ox-cart, and catch him.�299 In the Great War, the hare Bulgaria wanted above all else was Macedonia, a goal that was shared by their king, an ambitious and wily German prince known to Europe as Foxy Ferdinand. Possession of Macedonia would give them control not only of the Aegean coast but also of the valleys and railways that linked central Europe with the south and the Middle East. After some calculation, Ferdinand and his government decided that the Central Powers offered the better deal and so in the autumn of 1915 Bulgaria attacked Serbia. The Allies declared war. Bulgaria enjoyed a brief period of success, during which it seized the southern Dobrudja and much of Macedonia, but by 1918 its armies, short of weapons and food, could no longer fight. Bulgaria was the first of the Central Powers to surrender.

With Bulgaria’s defeat, Ferdinand abdicated and went back to his considerable estates in Austria-Hungary and to bird-watching, his one great passion in life apart from his mother. His successor