On October 5, 1912, Greece officially declared war on the Ottoman Empire and entered the First Balkan War. By the end of...

On October 5, 1912, Greece officially declared war on the Ottoman Empire and entered the First Balkan War. By the end of that campaign, Greece had nearly doubled in size, gaining Thessaloniki, much of Macedonia and Epirus, and key Aegean islands. Greece went into that war carrying the memory of a humiliating defeat in 1897. But Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos had spent the intervening years rebuilding the military and forging the Balkan League alongside Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro. The Ottoman Empire was weakened, and war had become almost inevitable. Before the fighting began, the Ottomans tried to keep Greece out by offering concessions on the Cretan Question. Athens refused and stood by its allies. On October 5, King George I addressed the Greek people, declaring that Greece, "fully armed alongside its allies, takes up the sacred struggle of justice and freedom." The advance was swift. The Army of Thessaly, under Crown Prince Constantine, swept north through Elassona, won the Battle of Sarantaporo, and pressed through Kozani, Veria, and Katerini. After the hard-fought Battle of Giannitsa, the road to Thessaloniki was open. On October 26, 1912, Ottoman commander Hassan Tahsin Pasha surrendered the city to Greek forces, just ahead of the Bulgarian army's arrival. That race for Thessaloniki was one of the war's most consequential geopolitical moments. At sea, Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis and the armored cruiser Georgios Averof secured Greek naval dominance in the Aegean, blocking Ottoman troop transfers to European fronts. Ioannina fell in February 1913, and after the Second Balkan War, Greece emerged from 1913 with territory and population nearly twice what they had been before. In less than a year, the borders of a small kingdom had shifted further than at any other point in modern Greek history. #Greece #BalkanWars #GreekHistory