A sensitive topic for decades (for ideological reasons), Dobruja is still a
challenge for many Romanian and Bulgarian historians. A peripheral and
hardly populated region, this territory lying between the Danube and the
Black Sea became the major source of dispute between Bucharest and Sofia at
the dawn of the last century. After 1878, legal history and statistics were
the pillars of the new identity of this former Ottoman territory di?vided
between Romania and Bulgaria, as a result of a decision made by the Great
Powers. In order to meet the specific requirements of young national states,
Dobruja underwent a colonisation process (whose intensity differed in the
two parts of the region). Ethnic diversity caused much concern, particularly
in the critical moments that endangered the relations between the two
neighbouring countries. The Balkan Wars represented the moment when the
Dobruja question officially emerged. Romania?s decision to annex South?ern
Dobruja would traumatise Bulgarian society, which would look forward to
retaliating. This moment occurred earlier than many Romanian politicians
expected. The spirit of revenge explains why the fighting on the Dobrujan
front was so intense in the autumn of 1916. Dobruja was the first province
of the Romanian Kingdom that fell under the Central Powers? occupation. The
documents stored in Romanian archives are too few to make it possible to
accurately reconstruct the history of this province during its military
occu?pation by the Central Powers. This is not an easy challenge: Romania,
Bulgaria, Russia, Serbia, Germany, Turkey and Austro-Hungary were in some
way involved in the events in Dobruja in the autumn of 1916.