“It is always best to cheer the victor in the Balkans regardless of one’s sympathies.”
Stanley Hart Osborn, 1915
Because of the fluid nature of boundaries, maps of the Balkans between 1870 and 1945 are notoriously inaccurate. This 1912 Library Atlas of the World, by Rand McNally & Company map of the Balkans was likely out of date before it was printed, as the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 redrew national borders. (Photograph by author)
The Balkans are a region in Southeast Europe primarily marked by the Balkan Mountains, and surrounded on three sides by the Adriatic, Aegean and Black Seas. Today the Balkan nations include Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Croatia. The mountains also serve to isolate ethnic groups with distinct languages and cultures. For centuries, these diverse peoples maintained their ethnic identities while under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1870s a series of wars and rebellions ended Ottoman rule in the Balkans though the Ottoman Empire continued to exert power on the Balkan states. As treaties recognized ethnic groups such as the Serbs, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, and Greeks, nations, such as Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy, tried to claim land and authority in the Balkans. Disputes over land kept the Balkans in a cycle of war and uneasy peace for years. The Balkan Wars (1912-1913) were fought primarily over lands in Macedonia, at the heart of the Balkans. A loose coalition of Balkan states, including both Serbia and Bulgaria, fought the Ottomans in the First Balkan War and won. Bulgaria, however, lost land to Serbia after the First Balkan War, and their already tenuous alliance broke up. The Second Balkan War lasted only a month, and resulted in Bulgaria losing land to Serbia and the Ottomans. Land grabs by eastern European nations meant that they had a stake in who controlled the Balkans. Tensions remained high when, in 1914, a Serbian assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Bosnia. The regional conflict was aggravated by a series of alliances with more powerful nations of Europe, and what started out as the Third Balkan War, between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalated into World War I.
Doctors Beyond Borders: Serbian Relief in 1915 
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