three countries, either purely Bulgar or purely Greek or purely Serb; most
of the towns contained a percentage of at least two of these
nationalities, not to mention the Turks (who after all were still the
owners of the country by right of conquest), Albanians, Tartars, Rumanians
(Vlakhs), and others; the city of Salonika was and is almost purely
Jewish, while in the country districts Turkish, Albanian, Greek, Bulgar,
and Serb villages were inextricably confused. Generally speaking, the
coastal strip was mainly Greek (the coast itself purely so), the interior
mainly Slav. The problem was for each country to peg out as large a claim
as possible, and so effectively, by any means in their power, to make the
majority of the population contained in that claim acknowledge itself to
be Bulgar, or Serb, or Greek, that when the agony of the Ottoman Empire
was over, each part of Macedonia would automatically fall into the arms of
its respective deliverers. The game was played through the appropriate
media of churches and schools, for the unfortunate Macedonian peasants had
first of all to be enlightened as to who they were, or rather as to who
they were told they had got to consider themselves, while the Church, as
always, conveniently covered a multitude of political aims; when those
methods flagged, a bomb would be thrown at, let us say, a Turkish official
by an _agent provocateur_ of one of the three players, inevitably
resulting in the necessary massacre of innocent Christians by the
ostensibly brutal but really equally innocent Turks, and an outcry in the
European press.

Bulgaria was first in the field and had a considerable start of the other
two rivals. The Bulgars claimed the whole of Macedonia, including Salonika
and all the Aegean coast (except Chalcidice), Okhrida, and Monastir;
Greece claimed all southern Macedonia, and Serbia parts of northern and
central Macedonia known as Old Serbia. The crux of the whole problem was,
and is, that the claims of Serbia and Greece do not clash, while that of