The wartime decade of the 1910s led to the first mass displacement of children on the European continent, which particularly affected the Balkan peninsula. The scale of dislocation was acute in the borderlands between Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey where alternating occupations and shifting borders resulted in many deportees, internees, and refugees. Resettled and unsettled, many children were separated from their families, lost their parents, or were left on their own devices.
This talk examines the case of adopted and fostered refugee children in the Balkan borderlands to unpack what treating a child “like my own” meant during the fluid transition from war to peace. The practice of adoption was codified in law in Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia in the early 1920s. Yet, adoption across borders, or what we call today international adoption, was not a category of international law. How did one then “adopt” a refugee child? How did parents claim back their children across national borders? How did officials handle contested cases? Whose interest came first—of the birth parents, the adoptive parents, or the child? I analyze the fate of children “taken for upbringings” to show the fragility of peace-making, border-making, and family-making after war.
Image credit: Bulgarian state archives
