Turmoil in the Balkans 1876 to 1918
This web page contains links to the content of the exhibit pages for the exhibit
'Turmoil in the Balkans 1876 to 1918' by Al Kugel.
This exhibit documents through contemporary postal material the tumultuous history of the Balkan Peninsula in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
The events were triggered by an uprising against the Ottoman Empire by the Christian Slavs in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1875, which caused an unsuccessful Serbian attack on Turkey.
Subsequently, the intervention of Russia in the war against the Turks resulted in the rescue of the Serbs, liberation of Bulgaria and expansion of Greece. Later, several additional small wars were fought, as the Balkan states essentially scrapped amongst themselves over the spoils of Turkey's lost possessions in Europe, with the loser in one conflict ready to take on the others in the next.
All of this culminated in the spark which touched off World War I being struck at Sarajevo in 1914.
This exhibit was created by, and is the property of the late Al Kugel, and is being supplied by his heirs as a courtesy to the Military Postal History Society. (See the MPHS webpage) The Military Postal History Society (MPHS) is a non-profit organization for philatelists and stamp collectors interested in the collecting and studying of the postal aspects of all wars and military actions of all countries, including soldiers' campaign covers, naval mail, occupation and internment covers, patriotics, propaganda, V-mail, censorship and similar related material.
These exhibit page scans were made from black and white photocopies of the original exhibits.
The photocopy PDF files were re-scanned with the ocrmypdf program, which makes them fully text-searchable.
Those exhibits were created by Al Kugel many years ago, and are presented here for historical and research purposes. As far as the MPHS is aware, there are no color scans available of these older exhibit pages, nor for any of the illustrated postal history items.
This exhibit, created by the late Al Kugel, is made up of 10 frames, each frame containing 16 pages. Due to their size, each frame is available as a separate searchable PDF file. (See the PDF information page for additional help with this file format.)
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Updated 21 June 2026