Republic of Bulgaria (Napoleon's World)

The Republic of Bulgaria was a short-lived nation in the Balkan Peninsula of Southeastern Europe, formed at the Treaty of Athens in 1960 at the conclusion of the Black Sea War as a homeland for the Bulgarian people, among the groups hardest hit by the war (a substantial part of the fighting had occurred in the Bulgarian homeland and upwards of 1,200,000 Bulgarian civilians died in the war). Bulgaria's territory was made larger than initially intended, and the poor, war-torn country quickly struggled to maintain its borders and entered violent border conflicts with all its neighbors - Greece, Turkey, Albania, Romania, and Serbia. For most of the 1960s it also suffered numerous coups and paramilitary violence as the country polarized along regional lines between cliques of different warlords and reprisal fighting escalated after the ethnic cleansing campaigns between Orthodox Bulgarians and their Muslim compatriots. The central government finally collapsed in late 1968, triggering the Bulgarian Crisis, in which Albanian and Turkish troops moved into Bulgaria to secure the peace and prevent "a Balkan anarchy." The crisis would lead to one of the most substantial Cold War standoffs, occurring concurrently with the St. Lawrence Crisis in North America, and concluded with Bulgaria's re-annexation by Turkey, leading shortly thereafter to Albania's rejoining of Turkey in 1971 and the reannexation of Kosovo in 1972 and Bosnia in 1976, thus restoring a substantial part of Turkey's lost territory in less than two decades.