141 “Betwixt and Between”: Physical Anthropology in Bulgaria and Serbia until the End of the First World War CHRISTIAN PROMITZER Bulgaria entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers in September 1915. At the time, few in the German Reich had profound knowledge of its new ally. Te German majority cultivated vague impres- sions of a possibly wild and romantic, but defnitely backward, petty king- dom somewhere on the eastern fringes of Europe. Te better informed also knew that the monarch was of German descent, and that the First Balkan War of 1912–1913, in which the Bulgarian army was a decisive party, had been a rehearsal to the ongoing European war with respect to conduct and weapons. Experts on Bulgaria—among them anthropologists and ethnolo- gists—quickly perceived an opportunity to gain publicity by servicing the demand for information. In 1917, Johann Baptist Loritz (1891–1965) published a short book, Unser Verbündeter Bulgarien [Our Ally Bulgaria], dedicating several pages of its lengthy chapter on the Bulgarian people to anthropological origins. Like the Serbs and Croats, Bulgarians were linguistically South Slavs, but Loritz stressed their divergent racial makeup—especially opportune now that Serbia was an enemy of the Reich. Bulgarians, he claimed, di fered somati- cally from other South Slavs. Serbs were taller, with lighter hair and eyes, while Bulgarians were more compact, but with a reduced incidence of brachy- cephaly (round heads). Te Balkan Peninsula’s pre-Slavic Illyrian population had lef only minor traces among the Bulgarians, compared to other South Slavs. Instead, the Bulgarian’s ancestors were non-Slavic “proto-Bulgarians” from the Volga basin who had settled the country in the sixth and seventh centuries. Loritz contended that his own anthropological investigations had shown that the Bulgarians were not of Finnish origin, as was commonly held by scholars in Bulgaria, but were descendants of the ancient population of