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Bulgarians Gazing at the Balkans just two. The blooming of the "flower," Yugoslavia, was not going well and Pashich explains that the reason for this was that it, the ower, had Serbian roots and could not therefore do well, no matter how much it was watered. Despite claims that the three different nationalities in the new federal unity—Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes— were equal to each other, it was dominated by Serbia and Serbian politicians. The cartoons reflect this fact. In addition, most of them illustrate the difficulties the prime minister, Pashich, was facing, all of them resulting from the disagreements between Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Hence, Yugoslavia was represented either as a nasty fly, as a hot soup, or as a beehive. Conclusion Satirizing the neighbors and their military defeats cannot but remind us of a proverb, common for many nations: “He who laughs longest, laughs best.” Romania, Greece, and the new-born Yugoslavia were among the winners at the end of World War I. The Bulgarians, although proud of their military victories, were again on the side of the losers because of the political and diplomatic inadequacy of their elite. The feelings of despair and deep grief that dominated public space in Bulgaria after the Versailles treaties were explicitly expressed in all the newspapers and journals of the time. The humorous press did not fail to interpret the war results as it had done in the preceding years. Here, I will summarize the observations above and draw a few conclusions. Firstly, we definitely see changes appearing in the images of the Other in Bulgaria at the beginning of the twentieth century during the period of wartime. Bulgaria was on the side of her neighbors only for a few months during the First Balkan War. After this brief period, friends turned to foes for several years, particularly during the Second Balkan War and World War I. The war years led to a focus on the characteristics of the neighboring peoples that were perceived to play a role in the process of the division of territory and during a generation of hostility. The majority of and, generally, most-hostile images of close Others appeared in times of direct confrontation—either military, as in the case of the Romanians in 1916, or diplomatic, as in 1919-1920 in the case of the Greeks. The repetition of images of the Romanians as a cowardly and boastful people who deserve to be given a lesson were evidence of Bulgarian national pride regarding the military victories at the front. On the other hand, these could be read as an expression of the need of the Bulgarian people to compensate for past humiliation and to make the Romanians feel defeat, as the Bulgarians had felt it in 1913. In the case of the Greeks, the shift from an attitude of pity for this people in 1915-1916 to one of hatred in 1919-1920 was due to the clash over Eastern Thrace. Hostility to the Greeks was expressed by showing the Greek prime minister as a greedy man ready to eat and swallow not only Thrace but also the whole earth and, even, the moon. In addition, when Greece was defeated in the Asia Minor campaign in 1919-1921, the image of the cowardly Greek rushing off from Turkey was often present in Bulgarian caricatures. In short, 427
