Geographical aspects of Balkan problems in their relation to the great European war

Preface

This little book is intended, as its title suggests, to summarize those geographical facts which made the Balkan Peninsula the potential storm-centre of Europe, for long years before the summer sky' was rent by the lightning-flash which destroyed for ever the Old Europe, and changed in a moment all the familiar fabric of our daily life. The facts herein set forth do not seem to have been previously collected and correlated in an English book, and some of them are not easy of access. At the same time, there can be little doubt that an acquaintance with them, and with their political and social bearings, is of great importance in forming a judgment on desirable frontier changes in the region. Primarily, indeed, the book was begun with the desire to beguile for one non-combatant the gloom of the Winter of Waiting by the carrying through of a self-imposed task which gave at least the illusion of usefulness. But it is hoped that this motive was not wholly illusory, and that the book may be found helpful to those who are striving to use their detachment from the actual field of battle to increase that knowledge vi PREFACE

of Others which is the beginning of pohtical as of all wisdom. The author is further not without some hope that even when the day of peace dawns finally the volume will not entirely lose significance; for we cannot beheve that the new Britain which will arise after the war can ever reacquire her former insular indifference to the politics and geography of the Near East. For this reason especially a deliberate attempt has been made to keep free from the bitterness of war, to set forth as dispassionately as may be the facts of geography which underlie the ceaseless racial strife of the sorely tried area here discussed, and thus to aid, in however insignificant a degree, in the building of that New Europe for which we wait and long.

Edinburgh,

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE STRUCTURAL CHARACTERS OF THE BALKAN

PENINSULA - - - - - I

Chapter I The Structural Characters Of The Balkan Peninsula

The Mediterranean peninsulas — Elements of the earth's crust in the Mediterranean region — Young folded mountains, ancient land-masses, foundered areas — The folded mountains of the Balkan Peninsula — General structure of the peninsula — Its chief political consequences.

Into the Mediterranean Sea there project four great tongues of land; of these, three are European, while the fourth — Asia Minor — owing to a mode of land division which present-day geography has inherited from an earlier period, is regarded as forming part of another continent. All four, however, possess certain features in common, and all are closely bound up with the history of the Mediterranean Sea. That sea is at once very young and very old. It is old in that the existing depression is a remnant of a mightier ocean, which can be traced back into early geological time; but it is young in that some of the separate basins which constitute it perhaps originated after man had appeared on the earth.

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It is beyond our scope here to trace through the ages the history of that part of the earth's surface over which the blue waters of the inland sea now flow, but at the same time it is difficult to understand existing relations — the relations which have made the political development of the Balkan Peninsula so troubled and so complex — without some reference to the geological past of the whole area.

Fig. I is a sketch-map showing certain structural features of the Mediterranean region. It will be noted that all four of its peninsulas are traversed, to a greater or less extent, by branches of those young mountain-chains which, though loftiest and most familiar in the case of the Alps, yet all but engirdle the Inland Sea. In addition to the mountain-chains, the map shows two other features of the Mediterranean area. Here are depressions — ■ depressions over which roll now the waters of the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, and JEgean Seas — which mark the site of foundered blocks of the earth's crust. Here also are massive resistant areas which, in Central Spain, in the centre of the Balkan Peninsula, in Asia Minor, have stood out both against the mountain-making forces which raised the Alps and their satellites, and against the landdestroying agents which caused old continents to founder beneath the ocean. Such old, resistant, continental masses always tend to repel human settlement to their margins; have tended, also, in human history to conserve powerful stocks of men, who time and again, after having been driven to the barren uplands, have there found strength, in the course of time, to surge downwards again to the marginal plains, and drive out the intruders who were once their conquerers.

As contrasted with Italy, the Iberian and the Balkan Peninsulas are specially remarkable for their central continental masses, margined by mountain and valley. Long centuries ago the Spaniard drove out the Arab; within our own day the Slav has been gathering strength to descend from the uplands and sweep the Turk from the plains. That it has taken him so long to do this is, as we shall see, largely a matter of the geographical characters of the land.

Old resistant land-masses, young folded mountain-chains, sea-covered basins where old lands have sunk — these are the three essential elements of the crust in and near the Mediterranean peninsulas. Let us note, in a few words, the relations of the three to one another.

The old land-masses, which consist almost exclusively of ancient types of rocks, are believed to have stood above the surface of the sea for a prolonged period. In the seas around them land waste was laid down, and here also in places massive limestones were built up by marine animals. At the end of long ages, for reasons about which we can only speculate, earth movements took place, and the great masses of sediment were folded and puckered, raised above sea-level, fractured, over-thrust, contorted, modified in a thousand ways, and thus mountain-chains arose.

If we hken the mountains to earth-waves, then we have to think of the old land blocks as forming breakwaters, against which the waves broke. The forces which crumpled the soft sedimentary rocks like paper, seem to have had little direct effect upon the old land blocks, for the folds turn round them as the incoming tide rounds projecting rocks and dashes up the intervening inlets. But if these mighty forces continue to act, the power of resistance of the blocks is sooner or later overcome. They cannot fold — for that they are too hard — but they seem to snap as ice or glass might snap. Great segments sink beneath the surface of the sea; others are thrust upward, raised above the general surface.

Now let us apply this general description to the areas shown in Fig. i . Only some of the old land blocks are indicated, but we may judge of their breakwater effect by the sweeping curves of the mountain-chains. Look first at the Alps proper. They swing in a huge semicircle round the Plain of Lombardy, and, far to the east, divide, as though parted by that block of which a fragment is exposed in the hills of Slavonia. The northern arm swings round as the Carpathians, is thrown back by the block of Russia (not shown), and forced to curve westward again as the Transylvanian Alps. These in their turn are blocked by the central mass of the Balkan Peninsula, which flings the folds eastwards, and they run on as the Balkan Range, till we lose them beneath the waters of the Black Sea.

Turn now to the southern branch of the Eastern Alps. It is deflected southward by the Slavonian mass, and runs in a south-easterly direction till it also abuts upon the central Balkan mass. Here the folds, if we may put the matter so, rebound much as a current of water swirls round in an eddy, and thus produce a region of great structural complexity, and, as we shall see, one also of great geographical importance. Thereafter the folds run for a time almost due south till they finally take an eastward direction once more, and are lost to us as they cross the ^gean and enter Asia Minor.

The result, as we see, is that the Rhodope mass in the centre of the peninsula is all but surrounded by folded chains. Necessarily, therefore, it is a region which has been subjected to great disturbance — fault lines, outbursts of volcanic rock, hot springs, are, as we shall see later, some of the signs of this disturbance. In the meantime, however, it is more important to notice, what the map only suggests — that, apparently as a result of the pressure of the mountain-building forces, the southern part of the old continental mass has sunk beneath the sea. When this sea — the ^Egean — was formed, the European part of the land block was broken off from the Asiatic; Europe was here separated from Asia, and the development of Greece was rendered possible.

The characters of the other peninsulas we shall not stay to note, but may point out that, just as the JEgean has been formed in a region of extensive ■ — and encircling — folding, so also have the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas originated in similar regions. It was the sinking of the Adriatic which gave a large part of the Balkan region its peninsular form, and the narrowness of that sea, especially at one critical area, has had much bearing upon the political history of the region.

Let us note one other point: the curve of the Carpathians bounds eastward the plain of Hungary; the curve of the Transylvanian Alps, continued into the Balkans, bounds to the westward the lower plain of the Danube {cf. Figs, i and 2 and the coloured map). The two plains are linked by that river, which is, however, constricted where it crosses the mountain belt at the narrow passage of the Iron Gates. Now, Hungarian plain and Roumanian basin alike were — geologically but yesterday — covered by a vast sea, a sea of which the present Black Sea is in part a remnant The Danube, at least in its lower portion, we may regard as the last relic of that former sea, for it arose as the sea drained away. The river has, both for Roumania and Bulgaria, the advantage of affording an admirable waterway, so that Bulgaria has a waterfront along her northern margin as well as on the east.

Serbia, whose northern boundary lies westward of the Iron Gates, looks, on the other hand, northward over the dried sea-basin of Hungary; her products can escape only by land routes, or, by permission of other Powers, by the Danube. Over the dried and fertile sea-basin of Hungary the northern Powers look jealously towards her land-locked territories, which block for them the road to the south. The fact that the old sea-basin has dried out more thoroughly to the north of Serbia than to the north and east of Bulgaria makes the one Power more " continental," the other more " peninsular," and is full of political significance. Further, the tolls exacted to cover the cost of the improvements at the Iron Gates makes the Danube a less convenient waterway for Serbia than for Bulgaria.

Once again, in the mighty wrinkle of the Central Alps, upheaved high to heaven, the opening of the folds has exposed a central core of ancient and hardened rocks — the limestones are mostly marginal. In the Eastern Alps, but much more in the Dinaric Alps, as indeed in the folded mountains of the Balkan Peninsula generally, limestones predom- . inate. Sometimes impure, and then leaving behind in their decay a not infertile earth, at other places, especially on the shores of the Northern Adriatic, they are almost pure. Washed by the rain, they dissolve away all but completely, and the gaunt, naked rocks of the karst country, almost waterless, almost treeless, cut off the more fertile inner lands from that sea, and make the Dinaric Alps, despite their relatively moderate elevation and their absence of permanent ice and snow, a more serious obstacle to transverse traffic than the lofty Central Alps.

The result is to force most of the traffic of the peninsula into a narrow passage between the Western Coastal Mountains and the central earth block — a passage which opens southwards to the JEgean, and northwards to the lands of Central Europe, up and down which has swept through history the tide of conquest; while the patient Slav peasant, trampled time and again beneath the feet of the contending parties, finds there, and there chiefly, the fertile patches of land for which his soul hungers. In this narrow belt, bounded westwards by the cruel karst hills, eastwards by the wooded, pasture-bearing central uplands, open widely at both ends, all but blocked at the sides — within this belt is concentrated most of the drama and most of the tragedy of the peninsula. Whether we think of the wistful Serb, with memories of past glories ; the Bulgar, looking down from his upland boundary to his compatriots in the storm-swept plains below ; the Greek, with his trader's instinct pushing inland from the seaports of the coast ; the Albanian, sweeping down from his mountain in brigand's raid, or creeping onward in peaceful agricultural penetration; or, again, of Teuton and Hungarian in the north; of Italian watching the gaps of the Coastal Mountains ; of the cynical Turk, still finding peasants to work for him in the midst of the pervading tumult — with whatever party our interests and our sympathies lie, we have to remember that here in this alleyway, which we, quite inappropriately, still call Macedonia, in this gap between western mountain and central land mass, lies the key to the history of the whole peninsula.

To this belt we shall have to devote much space in the following pages, but it may be well to note here that its northern entrance is Belgrade, where the Danube, after its general north-to-south course through Hungary, joins the Save and adopts that river's west-to-east course. Its southern gateway is Salonika, on the ^Egean, which for a considerable number of years has been linked to Belgrade by rail through Uskub and Nish. But it would be a mistake to give the impression that between these two great gates of the peninsula there runs a straight road. Rather should we compare the belt between Central Upland and Coastal Mountains to what the mountaineer calls a couloir — a passage between lofty rocks — but one which is itself encumbered and complex, so that more than one possible route exists through it. It is well to realize from the start that the railway between Salonika and Belgrade does not owe its course wholly to the nature

BALKAN PROBLEMS II

of the surface; political considerations had also some influence — as nearly always in the peninsula.

Again, just as Macedonia, in the broad sense, marks the gap between the western border of the Rhodope and the Coastal Mountains, and affords a passage-way through the peninsula, so also is there a similar gap between* the north-eastern border of the Rhodope and the Balkans. From Nish in the western belt a road crosses the junction between the Rhodope and the Balkans near Sofia, and descends to a broad valley beyond, a valley which leads ultimately to Constantinople. If the upper end of this intermediate belt has been for long Bulgarian, the lower end is still a storm centre; and even if the Turk be ousted from Europe, difficult readjustments will require to be made in this region.

Thus we should begin our detailed study of the Balkan Peninsula with a realization of the broad outlines of its structure (Fig. 2). A complex mass of upland, roughly triangular in shape, composed of hard, resistant rocks, rests with its apex on the Danube at Belgrade, its base stretching from the Black Sea to the ^gean. Its southern end, once continuous with the central mass of Asia Minor, lies sunk beneath the -^gean, which is fringed with the inlets and peninsulas which mark its shattered margin. The two sides of the triangle are bordered by young folded mountains, in which limestones largely predominate. But, necessarily, there is no

Fig. 2. — Structural Map of the Balkan Peninsula.

I, Folded mountain chains. 2, The central earth block, or Rhodope Upland. 3, Transition areas. Note the change in direction alike of coast-line and of the mountain-folds in the region of the Drin Gulf, and the position of the Albanian Gap. The map should be compared with Fig. 3 on p. 22. (In part after Cvijio.)

sudden transition between central mass and folded margin, Balkans and western mountains alike are separated from the Central Upland by areas whose special feature is the presence of fertile basins, which alternate with low ridges, offering no great obstacle to through transit, and with mountain-tracts. Within these two belts lie the best lands of the peninsula, but they themselves are the natural highways of traffic from north to south and from south to north, from north-west to south-east, from Asia to Europe, from the JEgean to the European plains.

It has been remarked by an acute observer that in the Balkan Peninsula the villages, contrary to the usual rule, tend to avoid the main road. Along that main road one may find a few large towns, but the smaller settlements, too well aware that the highway's main function throughout historical time has been to allow of the passage of armies, seek safety in the byways. But it has been the curse of the Balkan States that they could not, like small groups of individuals, thus avoid the main lines of communication. To fly to the hills to starve there; to remain along the main route and be crushed by trampling feet : it is scarcely too much to say that these have been the main alternatives before the nations of that troubled land.

We have said that the central mass of upland is roughly triangular in shape. In a quite general fashion we may say that the town of Belgrade is placed near the apex of the triangle, while Salonika and Constantinople occupy approximately the ends of the base line {cf. Figs. 2 and 3), and most of the more important towns of the peninsula are strung along the sides of the triangle, which are themselves the main lines of communication. To grasp these facts is to realize some of the essential difficulties which have retarded the political development of the peninsula.

It results necessarily from what has been said that, not only is there no natural centre within the peninsula about which, as nucleus, a great state might form, but that rivalries are almost certain to develop between small states. The fact that the peninsula is so easy of access from without — a point to which we shall return in a moment — means that weak peoples within will surge upwards from the plains on the main routes to mountains and uplands for safety. The danger past, they tend to descend, and are then confronted with the problem of how to divide among themselves the fertile plains which fringe the temporarily deserted highway. As fresh incursions from without are always liable to occur before internal adjustment has become possible, the problem is not one easily settled.

We have already seen that incursion from the north is easy, because, beyond the Save and the Danube, the peninsula lies open to the wide Hungarian plain; but it may be well to emphasize the contrast here with the ItaHan and Iberian Peninsulas . Both of these are separated from continental Europe by mountain-chains, not absolutely continuous from sea to sea, not, as history has shown, giving perfect and easily drawn frontier lines, but still of great value as constituting in each case a northern belt of relatively scantily-peopled land, permitting of the development of more or less demarcated nationalities respectively within and without the peninsular areas. In contrast with the Balkan region, it is worth note, the Iberian Peninsula is further remarkable in that it narrows where it is attached to the Continent — a fact which has helped to promote a distinction between intrapeninsular and extra-peninsular nationalities. On the other hand, the Balkan Peninsula is widest where it joins the Continent, no notable barrier to human progress separates the one region from the other, and, in association with this, many of the peoples of the peninsula have representatives, sometimes numerous representatives, beyond its largely artificial boundary lines. In other words, their interests are never wholly within the peninsula — are sometimes largely outside it.

What are its boundary lines ? As usually defined, the Balkan Peninsula is the land area to the south of a line drawn along the line of the Lower Danube, then of the Save and of its insignificant tributary, the Kulpa, and from the headwaters of this stream to the shore near Fiume. How artificial this

" geographical " frontier is may be realized from the fact that only along part of its course does it correspond to political boundaries, and from the other fact that few maps of the region go so far to the north-west. In reality, while the southern part of the Balkan region is a true peninsula, the northern quadrilateral, separated from Asia Minor only by the narrow submerged river valleys which we call the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles respectively, is really continental, in climate as well as in many of its characters. Europe stops, not at Constantinople, but in the steppe region behind it, for the city itself has but little relation to the northern part of the peninsula on which it stands. If we bear in mind that the factors we have stressed — the absence of a natural centre, of isolation from surrounding regions, the existence of broad, diverging highways leading through the heart of the land — have been in action for long centuries, then the welter of races and of creeds within the peninsula, the jealousies and quarrels, the short-lived triumphs of one race or another, will be readily understood. Here within a total area of some 191,000 square miles — that is, considerably less than Spain — ^no less than six native races dwell, in addition to representatives of not a few others. These six races have among them three creeds and an excommunicated Church, and that in a country where the absence of a strong state gives the creed a political force which is often greater than race. But these facts, so fraught with historical significance, are themselves largely explicable by the structure of the country. It is to that structure, therefore, that we must devote careful attention if we wish to understand the political conditions.

NOTE.

Forms of Place-Names.

In many parts of the Balkan Peninsula the towns and other geographical features have two names, Turkish and Slav respectively, while in some cases a third form, the Albanian, is added to these two. In this book an attempt has been made in each individual case to use the name rendered most familiar by recent publications, so that, for example, in Macedonia Turkish names have been generally employed, because the long Turkish occupation has made them most familiar. Thus, Uskub is used instead of the Slav equivalent of Skoplie, Monastir instead of Bitolia. Necessarily, however, consistency in such a matter is difficult.

In the parts of the region which have been long under Slav rule or influence, the Slav forms are naturally employed. Since the Slavs themselves use for the most part the Cyrillic alphabet, the question of transliteration at once arises. But in the north-west of the Peninsula, notably in Croatia, the Latin alphabet is used either exclusively, or, as in parts of Serbia, in conjunction with the Cyrillic. There is thus what may be described as a recognized mode of conversion of the two alphabets. But this involves the use in the Latin alphabet of certain special characters, indicated below, whose pronunciation is not directly apparent to. the English reader, nor, indeed, to the western European generally. There has in consequence been lately an increasing tendency, observable alike in English, French, and German publications, to use, in preference to this, modes of spelling which suggest, in the respective languages, the actual pronunciation. With some exceptions, notably in the case of place-names which have already become familiar to the general public in the Croatian l8 BALKAN PROBLEMS

forms, such " phonetic " spellings have been generally adopted here. Thus it would seem foolish pedantry to adopt the form Nis in place of Nish, and as the pronunciation of the unfamiliar name Crna must necessarily be obscure except to the few, in introducing the word it seems desirable to present it in the comprehensible form of Tzerna. On the other hand, to spell Cetinje as Tzetinye would probably be to make the town unrecognizable. The following table indicates the relation of the two modes of spelling, the characters given first being the Croatian ones:

c is pronounced tz — e.g., Marica — spelt here Maritza. 6 ,, ,, ch — e.g., Metkovic — spelt here Metkovich.

^ ,, ,, tch — e.g., KaCanik — spelt here Katchanik.

/ ,, ,, y — e.g., Janina — spelt here Yanina (before

terminal e, y becomes i — e.g., Skoplje =

Skoplie) . ^ ,, ,, sh — e.g., Nis — spelt here Nish.

z „ ,, j — e.g., Tundza — spelt here Tundja.

REFERENCES.

A GOOD general account of Cvijic's views on the structure of the Balkan Peninsula, views which have been largely followed in the above description, will be found in an article by K. Peucker, " Cvijic on the Structure of the Balkan Peninsula " {Geographical Journal, xix., 1902). See also a short article by Professor Cvijic, " La Forme de la Peninsule des Balkans," in Le Globe, xi., 1900, and a critical account by Philippson, " Neuere Forschungen i. d. westlichen Balkanhalbinsel " {Geographische Zeitschrift, ix., 1903). Cvijic's own full account of his observations and deductions is published only in Serbian, but some account of them is given in his " Grundlinien d. Geographic u. Geologic v. Mazedonien u. Altserbien " [Petermann's Mitteilungen, Erganzungsheft, 162, 1908). See also Philippson, " La Tectonique de I'Egeide " [Annales de Geographie, vii., 1898).

For a special study of the region a large scale map is essential. An excellent one is Der Europdische Orient, I : 1,200,000, prepared by the K. K. Militdr-Geographische Institut in Vienna, which has all the basins shown by special colouring.

Chapter II Geography And Politics I The Independent States And Their Aspirations

Difi&culties in the establishment of independent states — The four existing states — Constituent elements of Bulgaria — - Her rivers and her Thracian and Macedonian ambitions — Greece and the ^gean — The lands of Serbia — Her outlet to the sea — ^gean or Adriatic ? — The struggle for Salonika and the North ^gean — The independent states and the extra-peninsular Powers.

In the last chapter we indicated broadly the structural features of the Balkan Peninsula, and suggested their political significance. We saw that the structure is such that there is within the peninsula no natural centre about which a great state might crystallize, and, further, that the existence of two broad, diverging lines of communication, running respectively north to south and north - west to south - east, facilitates the entrance of alien peoples, and makes the establishment of even small states difficult. There is no natural rallying-point. There is easy access from Asia, for the waterways of which geographers used to make so much are but drowned river valleys. There is no natural line of separation from the plains of Central Europe. Is it, then, the inevitable destiny of the peninsula to be an annex either of a Central European state or of an Asiatic one ? Not a few diplomats and politicians have answered yes, but the inhabitants of the region have hitherto succeeded in defying them. They have, indeed, in many cases shown an almost superhuman tenacity in seeking their independence, or in maintaining it against the mighty of the earth. The poet may see in such struggles a manifestation of human greatness; the geographer will suspect that the surface relief is exercising an influence for which the diplomat has failed to allow. Whether or not the stars in their courses are fighting against Turk and Teuton we know not, but we can at least bring some evidence which tends to show that, despite appearances, the structure of the land is not wholly in their favour.

Let us note, then, in the first place quite generally, the relation of the existing states to the surface forms and the underlying structural features.

Before the 191 3 settlement — if we can call an arrangement which settled nothing a settlement — there were in the Balkan region four independent states — Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro. Bosnia and Herzegovina had passed wholly from the Turk into the hands of the Austrian, who had still earlier obtained Dalmatia and the small part of Croatia which comes into the peninsula as defined on p . 15. Separating Greece alike from the Slav States and from the Austrian lands was a broad belt of Turkish territory, which included a considerable part of the west coast (Albania and Epirus), the narrow, almost enclosed, region of Novibazar dividing Serbia from Montenegro, the area which extends southward from it to the ^gean, to w^hich the vague name Macedonia is generally given in discussions of Turkish problems, and, finally, the belt between the southern boundary of Bulgaria and the ^gean, which similarly is somewhat vaguely called Thrace. The old boundaries are shown on Fig. 3.