Romanians and Bulgarians at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Political assassinations, border incidents and the attempted anarchist/terrorist plot against King Carol I (1900-1901)

Abstract

At the beginning of 1900, Romanian-Bulgarian relations were very tense, being fuelled by both the incidents at the Southern border and the attacks that took place on the Romanian territory, thus, on the agenda of the Romanian politicians, the problem of the Aromanians from the Balkan Peninsula and Macedonia, the province coveted by Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbs, where comitagii gangs, the antarti and the cetnic fought both for the liberation of the countrymen from Ottoman rule and with the Turkish troops. In this context, assassination came to be used as a weapon against opponents, being present in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece.
At the end of the 19th century, Romanian society was suddenly awakened to reality, facing the consequences of the barbaric manner in which one of these revolutionary secret committees acted, whose anarchist subcommittee was established in Bucharest – nowadays we frequently use the phrase terrorist cell for something similar. Thus, it received the mission to commit several bombings on the Romanian territory, as well as the assassination of King Carol I and Romanian dignitaries, while, at the Southern border, the Romanian border guards reported daily incidents at the common border whose purpose was to destabilize and maintain a tense state on the conventional demarcation line between Romania and Bulgaria.