Battle of Kresna Gorge

The Battle of Kresna Gorge was fought in 1913 between the Greeks and the Bulgarians during the Second Balkan War.

Battle of Kresna Gorge
Part of Second Balkan War
Greek units advancing in Kresna Gorge
Date 8 July–18 July 1913 Location Kresna Gorge, Bulgaria Result Stalemate brought about by truce
Belligerents
Bulgaria	Greece
Commanders and leaders
Gen. Mihail Savov Gen. Nikola Ivanov	King Constantine I
Strength
110 battalions	80 battalions
Casualties and losses
	10,000

After the Serbian front became static, and seeing that the Bulgarian Army in his front had already suffered defeat, King Constantine ordered the Greek Army to march further into Bulgarian territory and take the capital city of Sofia. King Constantine wanted a decisive victory on this war despite the objections of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos who realized that the Serbs, having won their territorial objectives, were now trying to move the weight of the rest of the war to the Greeks by staying passive. In the pass of Kresna the Greeks were ambushed by the Bulgarian 2nd and 1st Army newly arrived from the Serbian front that had already taken defensive positions there. The battle was continued for eleven days, between July 8-18, over a front of 20 km, in a maze of forests and mountains with no conclusion. The Greek King, seeing that the units he fought were from the Serbian front, tried to convince the Serbs to renew their attack, as the front ahead them was now thinner, but the Serbs, already under Russian pressure, rejected it having nothing more to gain.

By July 14 the Greek army was outnumbered by the now counterattacking Bulgarian armies, and the Bulgarian General Staff, attempting to encircle the Greeks in a Cannae-type battle, was applying pressure on their flanks. The Greeks launched counter-attacks at Mehomia and to the west of Kresna and by July 17 the Bulgarian attacks had subsided somewhat. Yet king Constantine, who had neglected the initial Bulgarian requests for truce, now informed Venizelos, that his army was "physically and morally exhausted" and urged him to seek cessation of hostilities through Romanian mediation. The resulted general armistice (signed on 18/31 July 1913 in Bucharest) ended one of the bloodiest battles of the Second Balkan War.

Legacy

Armistice left both parties claiming victory. From the Greek point of view, after 11 days of attack the Bulgarians had clearly failed to turn the Greek army's flanks, and consequently they consider the battle a defensive victory. To the Bulgarians, the battle was a victory since their attack successfully stopped the Greek Army's advance towards Sofia and thus induced the Greeks to accept the proposed armistice. Although the battle was ended inconclusively by the armistice, there is even a Bulgarian claim of an imminent encirclement of the Greek army had the operations continued. The Greek side counters the argument by pointing to the fact that during the prolonged battle, the Bulgarians had progressively involved all available forces, and anyhow lacked the additional manpower to complete the encirclement of the Greek forces. In any case, the battle would not decide the outcome of the war: on 18 July, the day of the armistice, the Romanian army, facing no resistance, had reached Vrazhdebna, just 7 miles from Sofia.

Sources

• Price W. H. Crawfurd. The Balkan Cockpit - The Political and Military Story of the Balkan Wars in Macedonia. Read Books, 2008. ISBN 9781443774048.