When the military actions between
Serbia,
Greece,
Montenegro and
Romania against
Bulgaria were in full progress, the
Ottoman Empire took advantage of the situation to recover some of its former possessions in
Thrace including
Adrianople. In the beginning of July 1913 its forces crossed the Bulgarian border on the line
Midiya-
Enos, settled by the
Treaty of London in May 1913. Because the Bulgarian troops had all been allocated to the front with Serbia and Greece, the Ottoman armies suffered no combat casualties and moved northwards and westwards without battles. Thus reoccupied territories were given back to the Ottoman Empire by the
Treaty of Constantinople, signed on September 16. Despite that, the mass extermination and ethnic cleansing continued in the areas controlled by the Ottomans even after this date. boundaries. Shortly after the end of the hostilities, the author interviewed hundreds of refugees from these regions, travelled himself in the places where these tragic events happened and systematically depicted in detail the atrocities, committed by the
Young Turks' regular army, Ottoman paramilitary forces and partly by local
Greeks. As a result of this violent process, approximately 200,000 Bulgarians were killed or forced to leave their homes and properties forever, seeking salvation in territories, controlled by Bulgarian army and paramilitary formation
Internal Macedonian Adrianople Revolutionary Organization. Ottoman military campaign lasted for a mere 3 weeks from 20 July 1913 to 10 August 1913. According to Carnegie Commission 15,960 Bulgarians were "either killed, burned in the houses or scattered among the mountains" and several thousands more were massacred in Western Thrace within this period. After the exchange,
in 1914 there still remained 14,908 Bulgarians belonging to the
Bulgarian Exarchate in Ottoman Empire, 2,502 in Edirne, including
the area that was ceded to Bulgaria in 1915, 3,339 in Constantinople and its environs and 338 in
Çatalca. Their descendants in contemporary
Bulgaria are about 800,000 people. ==Population estimates==