In today’s edition of the “Macedonian Maps” section we look at a German map from 1915. There Macedonia is referred to as the “Disputed Country of Macedonia”.
The map material comes from the “Flemmings Maps” (Flemmings Karten) collection, the map published in 1915 that we are looking at is called the “Flemmings Map of Serbia and Macedonia”.
The map on a scale of 1:1100000 was created by Prof. Dr. J.J. Kettler published. The price of the “war ticket” was back then 1 Mark.
The legend of the map explains the different colored markings that show the borders of the countries in the Balkan region around Macedonia. Basically all the states known today can be found there: Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Albania, Italy, the monastery area of Athos and Austria-Hungary. Macedonia, on the other hand, is referred to in the legend as “The Disputed Country of Macedonia”.
But if you look closely at the map, you don’t see any color-coded borderline around Macedonia. Rather, the ethnographic borders of Macedonia were color-coded as a whole area.
“Disputed Country Macedonia”
It is easy to explain what this map was supposed to convey to readers of the time: In the Bucharest peace treaty in 1913, Macedonia was divided among three neighboring countries.
The map was published shortly after the partition of Macedonia, two years later to be exact.
Macedonian territories were awarded to Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Albania. The so-called Vardar Macedonia (the area of what is now the Republic of Macedonia) came under Serbian rule, Pirin Macedonia came under Bulgarian sovereignty and most of Macedonia, Aegean Macedonia was annexed by Greece for the first time in 1912 and as new territories by the great powers during the peace negotiations a year later approved.
Exactly those occupied Macedonian territories were marked on the Flemmings map as the “Disputed Country of Macedonia” via the color-coded border lines of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria.
