One year ago today I went to the ER with 10 toes and woke up with only 6 remaining. And the long road to recovery began.

But since I am not all that important I will check history and see that the very First Balkan War began in 1912…..

The First Balkan War breaks out between the members of the Balkan League–Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro–and the Ottoman Empire.

…….another and far more serious war had broken out in the Balkan peninsula. It took the form of an attack on Turkey by the four contiguous Christian states, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro. The alliance of Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro – Christians, former rayahs of the Ottoman empire, to the end of solving the remaining problems of the peninsula, had often been suggested, but the idea had regularly suffered shipwreck on the fierce competitive nationalism of the youthful states.

The feelings harbored toward each other by the Serbs and Bulgars were amply divulged by the war of 1885, while the desolating, unofficial conflict in Macedonia among Bulgars, Greeks, Serbs, and Albanians, left no doubt as to the jealousy rampant among these four groups. But what no statesmanship in or outside Balkania working over time had been able to accomplish, the mistaken zeal of the Young Turks brought about in a few months. Their purpose, reduced to its simplest terms, was a resuscitated Ottoman empire. But this, the patriotic hope of the Young Turks, was to the Christian communities only recently rescued from Turkish bondage, nothing less than a nightmare filling them with fear and horror.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/balkan-1.htm

Keeping with my tradition of trying to make it easier for those that have a hard time with the study of history I have included a short video explaining the event…..

This conflict should have signaled the possibility of a wider war in Europe….but the signals were ignored and in 1914 World War One erupted and the death and the destruction was immense.

Plus 80 years later, after break-up of the former country of Yugoslavia, another situation erupted and the world reacted and once again the death and destruction came to the region.