The Balkan War in Epirus: Religious Identity and the Continuity of Conflict

Abstract

ABSTRACT The scholarship about the Balkan Wars is a vast corpus that has expanded our knowledge of war experiences, violence, ethnic cleansing, state building, and has stressed the conflict as a point of rupture. While scholars have transcended national narratives in our quest for historical realities, we have typically painted the conflict broadly as a monolithic experience of two wars within the rigid timeframe of 1912–1913. Given its historical background, Epirus provides a unique case study for the Balkan Wars. By examining the conflict through the lens of religion, this essay argues that in the case of Epirus, the Balkan Wars magnified an already developing schism that led to a violent and briefly successful separatist movement. Furthermore, rather than two brief wars, within the context of Epirus, it was one Balkan War that lasted until the outbreak of the First World War.