War of the Stray Dog

Date

18–23 October 1925

Location

Petrich, southern Bulgaria

Result

Bulgarian Victory

After a decision of the League of Nations, Greek forces withdraw from Bulgaria and Greece paid an indemnity to Bulgaria.

Belligerents

Bulgaria

Greece

Commanders and leaders

Boris III
Aleksandar Tsankov

Theodoros Pangalos

Casualties and losses

50 mostly civilians

121 (Bulgarian claim)

Bulgarian Victory

The Incident at Petrich, or the War of the Stray Dog, was a Greek–Bulgarian crisis in 1925, in which there was a short invasion of Bulgaria by Greece near the border town of Petrich, after the killing of a Greek captain and a sentry by Bulgarian soldiers. The incident ended after a decision of the League of Nations.

The relations between Greece and Bulgaria had been strained since the start of the 20th century, with their mutual rivalry over possession of Macedonia and later Western Thrace. This had led to years of guerrilla warfare between rival armed groups in 1904–08 (cf. Macedonian Struggle), and a few years later in the open conflict between the two states in the Second Balkan War (1913) and again in the First World War (Macedonian Front, 1916–18). The outcome of these conflicts was that half of the wider region of Macedonia came under Greek control after the Balkan Wars, followed by Western Thrace after the First World War, through the Treaty of Neuilly.

Nevertheless, the two regions remained a target of Bulgarian irredentism throughout the interwar period, with two organizations, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and the Internal Thracian Revolutionary Organisation (ITRO), based in Bulgarian territory and launching raids and terrorist attacks into Greek and Yugoslav territory.Petrich was the administrative center of the Bulgarian-held Pirin Macedonia, where in the early interwar years the IMRO practically ran a state within a state: in 1923, when the Bulgarian prime minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski's policies of reconciliation with Yugoslavia threatened its existence, IMRO played a leading role in his assassination.

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