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Updated: May 23, 2025
And in refusing to sacrifice the lives of his subjects the military judgment of Constantine has been vindicated. He was willing to attack Turkey through Kavalla and Thrace, because by that route he presented an armed front to Bulgaria. But, as he pointed out, if he sent his army to the Dardanelles, he left Kavalla at the mercy of his enemy.
As a buffer against Turkey, he considered Kavalla of the greatest strategic value, and he had the natural pride of a soldier in holding on to land he himself had added to his country. But in his opposition to Venizelos in this particular, credit was not given him for acting in the interests of Greece, but of playing into the hands of Germany.
This point gained, he was further solicited to cede Kavalla and some 2000 square kilometres of territory incorporated with Greece, to Bulgaria, in return for the future possession of 140,000 square kilometres in western Asia Minor.
But these were merely demonstrations meant merely as indications of popular sentiment for neither Venizelos nor the Kavalla representative had any intention of taking their seats in the chamber, which they considered illegally elected. Meanwhile practically no military activity had been displayed.
Venizelos also was working for the good of Greece, but he was convinced it could come to her only through the union. He was willing to give Kavalla to Bulgaria in exchange for Asia Minor, from the Dardanelles to Smyrna. But the King would not consent.
Kavalla is more valuable to Grecian hearts than all Africa, for how could we desert our Grecian brothers and place them beneath the rule of the Turk or Bulgar?" On the train were more American doctors. One had just arrived, and was still full of enthusiasm for scenery and sanitation. Also there was Princess surrounded by packing cases.
On the following day, May 8, 1916, at a by-election in Kavalla, Eastern Macedonia, Constantine Jourdanou, a candidate of the Venizelos Liberty party, was also elected a deputy to the National Assembly by an 85 per cent majority vote.
These two stated definitely Bulgaria's price; that part of Macedonia which was to have been allowed to her by the agreement which bound her to Serbia and Greece during the first Balkan War; the Valley of the Struma, including the port of Kavalla, that part of Thrace which she herself had taken from Turkey, and the southern Dobruja, the whole of the territory Rumania had filched from her while her back was turned during the two Balkan wars.
"Better let George do it," I urged. And when his name was called, a name that is as well known from Kavalla to Smyrna in tobacco-fields, sweetmeat shops, palaces, and mosques, as at the Ritz and the Gaiety, the cigarette king wisely accepted for his four sovereigns Italian lire. At their rate of exchange, too.
But the Habsburg Government had undertaken to see him through the ordeal to which he was then subjected by his own people. The Treaty of Bucharest, which deprived Bulgaria of Kavalla and Salonica, left the wound to fester and Austro-Bulgarian friendship to harden into a definite alliance.
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