ABSTRACT
Bulgaria was among the losers in World War I. The Bulgarian front at Dobro Pole was broken in September 1918 by the superior forces of the Entente. The retreating Bulgarian soldiers started a revolt. Headed by the Agrarian leaders Rayko Daskalov and a reluctant Aleksandŭr Stamboliiski, the soldiers were stopped by a Bulgarian detachment and a German unit before entering Sofia. A civil war was thus avoided. The monarch Ferdinand of Saxe Coburg-Gotha abdicated in favor of his son Boris, so the monarchy was preserved. Bulgaria lost its territorial wartime gains in Aegean Macedonia to Greece and in central Macedonia to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes; the latter gained also small territories along the western borderlands of Bulgaria (so-called zapadni pokrainini). Southern Dobrudja, that was regained during the war, was returned to Romania. Western Thrace, which Bulgaria had gained after the Balkan Wars, remained under Allied occupation and was subsequently given to Greece. Thus the promised access for Bulgaria to the Aegean never materialized. By 1920, the country was flooded with over 200,000 refugees, mostly from Macedonia but also from Thrace. British and French Military Missions stayed in Sofia through 1920 to ensure demilitarization, and an Allied Control Commission oversaw the transfer of the enormous reparations levied on Bulgaria by the Treaty of Neuilly in 1919: more than 2 billion gold francs were due over 37 years; the burden was reduced in 1923.
