Voordrachten

Terreur in Thessaloniki

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Abstract

In April 1903 a group of young Bulgarian nationalists influenced by Russian radical socialism carried out a number of bomb attacks on public buildings and foreign properties in Thessaloniki. They were members of the notorious Internal Macedonian and Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Organisation, but acted mainly on their own. Their aim was to provoke an international diplomatic or military intervention which would force the Ottoman government to implement the administrative reforms imposed by the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. This article evokes the troublesome preparation and the execution of the outrages as described in the memoirs of the participants and in the accounts of eyewitnesses. It is a tragicomic story which ended in a catastrophe. Most of the perpetrators were killed or committed suicide. The survivors were sentenced to long prison terms. (They were amnestied after the Young Turk revolution in 1908.) The Ottoman authorities kept their head and succeeded in averting an international intervention. Public opinion abroad denounced the Bulgarian assaults and Greece’s involvement in Macedonian affairs only increased. Ultimately, the bomb attacks in Thessaloniki turned out to have been a serious setback to the Bulgarian national liberation movement in Macedonia.

How to Cite:

Detrez, R., (2008) “Terreur in Thessaloniki”, Tetradio 17(1): 3, 67–88. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tetradio.91781