The Drama uprising

On the evening of Sunday 28 September 1941 armed inhabitants of the small town of Doxato (PL) and the neighbouring village of Choristi attacked the Bulgarian police post in Doxato and killed the policemen. The same night, in dozens of villages around Drama in Greek Eastern Macedonia, groups of insurgents attacked police posts, municipal offices and village headmen appointed by the Bulgarians, and in the town itself they blew up one of the power stations. It was the first mass armed rising against the occupiers in occupied Greece, prepared by the local leadership of the Communist Party of Greece. It lasted a few days. From the morning of 29 September the Bulgarian army and police carried out reprisals that cost the lives of at least two thousand Greek civilians – by some estimates far more – and became one of the bloodiest crimes of the first year of occupation in the Balkans.

War chronologies record under 28–29 September that the Drama uprising against Bulgarian occupation was quickly crushed and that some 3,000 people were executed in reprisal. The dates are precise: the fighting began on the evening of 28 September and the mass executions the following morning. The death toll, however, is only one of many estimates. Bulgarian military reports spoke of 1,600 Greeks killed, Greek researchers give more than 2,000 and some 4,000–5,000, and older studies even more. The figure of 3,000 appears in part of the literature but is no more certain than the others.

The Bulgarian occupation zone

The Germans attacked Greece on 6 April 1941, partly from the territory of Bulgaria, which a month earlier had joined the Tripartite Pact in return for the promise of an Aegean coastline. The Bulgarian army took no part in the fighting. On 20 April, when Greek resistance in the north had already ceased, its I Corps entered Greek Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace without firing a shot. Bulgaria received the lands between the Struma (Strymonas) river and a border strip along the Maritsa (Evros), with the towns of Serres, Drama, Kavala, Xanthi (PL) and Komotini, and the islands of Thasos and Samothrace. The Germans kept the strip along the Maritsa, on the Turkish border, for themselves, and placed Thessaloniki and Central Macedonia under their own administration. When the Germans occupied Athens and set up a collaborationist government there, it turned out that its authority did not extend to the lands taken by the Bulgarians.

Tsar Boris III visited the new lands at the end of April. The Bulgarians regarded them as their own: part of them had belonged to Bulgaria after the First Balkan War, and in 1919 the Treaty of Neuilly had taken Western Thrace and access to the sea away from it. Unlike Germany and Italy, Bulgaria did not treat the occupied lands as an occupation zone. From May 1941 it introduced its own administration there as in any part of the state, calling the region Belomorie (the White Sea lands). Germany did not recognise a formal annexation and deferred the question of borders to a peace conference, but in practice gave Sofia a free hand.

For the first few weeks the Bulgarian authorities tried to win over the inhabitants with propaganda, by opening schools and by distributing food to children. They soon turned, however, to a policy of Bulgarisation. The population of the region was overwhelmingly Greek, since in the 1920s tens of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor, arriving under the population exchange with Turkey, had been settled there. The Bulgarians expelled Greek mayors, officials, teachers, judges, lawyers, clergy and gendarmerie officers, closed Greek schools, banned the use of Greek in offices and in the street, renamed places and forced people to adopt Bulgarian surname endings. A licensing system was introduced without which a Greek could neither practise a profession nor run a business. According to the American historian Marshall Lee Miller, more than seven hundred shops and businesses were expropriated in Kavala alone. Greek land and houses were handed over to settlers from Bulgaria, encouraged to come by loans. On 15 September 1941 the Bulgarian prefect of Drama, in a letter to the interior ministry, demanded outright the removal of the Greek element so that the economic and political Bulgarisation of the region could begin.

The result was flight. By Bulgarian estimates, by the end of the summer of 1941 some 25,000 Greeks had left the prefecture of Drama for the German zone. On top of this, a population already ruined by war and requisitions was hit by a collapse in food supplies, which in the autumn of 1941 turned into famine throughout Greece.

Preparations

Resistance in Eastern Macedonia began with the communists. The Macedonian Bureau of the Communist Party of Greece was active here, and the most active body was the district committee in Drama, whose secretary was Pantelis Chamalidis, known by the pseudonyms “Alekos” and “Armenis”. The party, which after the German attack on the USSR had called for a struggle against the occupiers, published an underground newspaper and leaflets here, and from the summer of 1941 formed small armed groups in the mountains. At the beginning of September, according to Greek studies, they numbered about two hundred armed men. West of the Struma, in the German zone, similar units were operating; they raided police posts and on 22 September attacked a German column near Lachanas.

It is not entirely clear who decided to move to open insurrection: the Macedonian Bureau or the Drama committee itself. Historians agree, however, that it happened without the consent of the KKE’s central leadership in Athens, which in those same days was building a broad political front and on 27 September founded EAM. Not all local communists supported the plan. The secretary of the Macedonian Bureau, Apostolos Tzanis, was reportedly opposed to extending the armed struggle and, fearing reprisals, tried to stop the villages around Serres from joining in. The original plan is said to have envisaged acts of sabotage: blowing up the Drama power station and two bridges. In the end the general rising was set for the night of 28–29 September.

The night of 28–29 September

The fighting began prematurely in Doxato. Insurgents from the town and from Choristi, led by Christos Kalaitzis, attacked the police post. Sources differ on how many Bulgarians were killed there: Miller writes that the entire garrison of twenty policemen was massacred, while more recent studies speak of six or seven. Similar attacks were carried out in some 25 localities. The insurgents killed Bulgarian officials appointed to the municipalities, Greek collaborators and policemen. In Prosotsani the municipal office, the police post and the garrison were attacked simultaneously, and the next morning “people’s power” was proclaimed there. The proclamation was read in Greek, and one of the leaders spoke in the local Slavic dialect. In Drama itself the insurgents managed to blow up one of the two power stations and scatter leaflets. An attack on the railway station failed, as did an attempt to blow up the railway bridge near Nikiforos.

In the countryside Bulgarian authority ceased to exist for a few hours, but in Drama the insurgents achieved none of their objectives. The shooting in Doxato had alerted the Bulgarians early, and the plan was poorly prepared. The leadership abandoned the village of Mavrovatos, its headquarters during the first hours, and withdrew into the mountains. According to Greek researchers, Chamalidis also made a tactical error: instead of switching to guerrilla warfare, he tried to face the army in the open field. The Bulgarian historian Georgi Daskalov noted that the insurgents committed no violence against Bulgarian civilians and prisoners. According to Bulgarian figures, 25 Bulgarians were killed and 18 wounded in the first two days.

The reprisals

From the morning of 29 September the Bulgarian army and police counter-attacked. In Drama and in the rebellious localities all men aged 18 to 45 were detained. In the town, arrests, killings in the streets, torture in police stations and barracks, and mass executions went on for several days. Shootings took place at several sites: by the Tobacco Institute, at the foot of Korylovos hill and behind the boys’ grammar school. Greek researchers estimate the number of victims in Drama itself at between 366 and 500. In Doxato 350 men were shot on 29 September, and in Choristi 135. According to accounts from Doxato, the detainees were divided into tens and shot in groups. In Kyrgia 114 inhabitants were killed, in Kormista near Serres 92, and in the area of ancient Philippi 30. The executions extended to more than 60 towns and villages, including some around Serres and Kavala that had taken no part in the uprising.

Bulgarian authority was restored by 2 October. From 1 to 6 October three gendarmerie groups, supported by artillery and aircraft, cleared the insurgents’ mountain hideouts, among them in the Pangaion massif. The pursuit of the last partisans and of people who had fled their homes went on until the beginning of November. Almost all the leaders of the uprising were killed in combat, while fleeing to the German zone or by sentence of Bulgarian military courts. Of the members of the Macedonian Bureau only one survived. According to Bulgarian figures, Bulgarian losses in the whole uprising and the pacification operations came to 104 killed and 107 wounded, including appointed officials and collaborators.

The tally of Greek victims is uncertain, since no one kept records at the time. Bulgarian military reports spoke of about 1,600 Greeks killed in the uprising and the following weeks. Modern Greek studies give a figure of more than 2,000, and some estimates 4,000–5,000. Miller’s work, published in 1975, wrote of more than 3,000 shot in Drama alone and 15,000 killed within a few weeks, but later research, based also on Bulgarian archives, accepts much lower figures. After the war the Greek state recognised Drama, Doxato, Choristi, Kyrgia, Prosotsani and Sidironero as martyr localities.

Uprising or provocation?

From the first weeks after the rising was crushed, a version circulated that it had been instigated by Bulgarian provocateurs to provide a pretext for getting rid of the Greeks. It was first spread by the inspector-general of the Macedonian prefectures, Athanasios Chrysochoou. In a report for the collaborationist government in Athens and for the Germans he attributed the uprising to joint action by Greek and Bulgarian communists, and later claimed that it had been organised by the Bulgarian occupation authorities with the willing complicity of Greek communists. After the civil war this version was taken up by the Greek right, for which it was a convenient argument against the left. Paradoxically, a similar thesis was also put forward by some memoirists and historians associated with the KKE, among them Markos Vafiadis and Thanasis Hatzis. The defeat, the cruel reprisals, the swift death of almost all the organisers and the absence of an official party version led them to blame Bulgarian agents who had supposedly lured Chamalidis into a trap. The only surviving member of the Macedonian Bureau, Theoklitos Krokos, had to answer before a party commission for the “unauthorised” outbreak of the uprising.

Bulgarian propaganda in 1941, for its part, claimed that the uprising had been prepared by Greeks who had come from the German zone, and later that it was the work of Greek communists and nationalists cooperating with the Comintern and the British government. Traces of this version survive in some Bulgarian publications to this day. Scholarly Bulgarian historiography presents the uprising as a communist action carried out in line with the Comintern’s policy, or as a purely Greek undertaking.

Miller wrote in 1975 that there was no conclusive evidence of a Bulgarian provocation, although historians of both countries continued to voice suspicions. The German historian Hagen Fleischer saw indications that the Greek communists had been lured into a trap, and judged the uprising itself militarily insignificant, though the Bulgarian losses were enough to justify reprisals. More recent Greek research, conducted also in Bulgarian archives, rejects the provocation thesis as groundless. Dimitris Paschalidis and Tasos Hatzianastasiou concluded that the uprising was a purely Greek affair, and that the very scale of Bulgarian losses contradicts the thesis that it was instigated by the Bulgarian authorities. Spyridon Sfetas, who studied Bulgarian military archives, found no evidence of provocation, but pointed out that the occupation authorities knew of the planned action and did nothing to prevent it. However the uprising began, the collective reprisals against the civilian population, including villages that had taken no part in it, were a crime for which no source finds any justification.

Place in the war

The bloody suppression of the rising accelerated what the Bulgarian authorities had been aiming for. After the massacres more than 10,000 Greeks fled from the prefecture of Drama to the German occupation zone, and reprisals and requisitions continued for many months. Miller writes that villages were burned for sheltering “partisans” who were in fact survivors of villages destroyed earlier, and that terror and hunger were so severe that the government in Athens considered evacuating the region’s entire Greek population. By the end of 1942, by estimates, more than 100,000 Greeks had been expelled or driven out of the Bulgarian zone. Refugees who reached Thessaloniki in the winter of 1941–1942 aggravated the hunger and epidemics there.

On hearing of the massacre, the KKE leadership sent a member of the central committee, Chrysa Hatzivasileiou, to Thessaloniki with instructions to halt the armed struggle in Macedonia. The population of the region long lost its trust in left-wing units, which later made it easier for rival nationalist armed groups to emerge. In the same weeks the Germans brutally crushed the first partisan units in their zone west of the Struma, burning villages and shooting hundreds of civilians, as they had done earlier in the massacres at Kondomari and Kandanos on Crete. The partisan movement in northern Greece went dormant for several months and revived on a larger scale only in 1942, by then under the banner of ELAS.

In March 1943 the Bulgarian authorities arrested more than 4,000 Jews in Thrace and Eastern Macedonia and handed them over to the Germans, who deported them to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Bulgarian occupation lasted until the autumn of 1944. After the coup in Sofia on 9 September Bulgaria changed sides, but it wanted to keep the occupied lands and counted on Soviet support in this. It withdrew from Greece in October 1944 only under pressure from Britain, which made this a condition of the armistice. In 1945 Bulgarian people’s courts also tried officials and officers of the occupation administration. The Drama uprising and its suppression remain among the most lasting wounds in the memory of northern Greece and still weigh on Greek–Bulgarian relations today.