The Expulsion of the Thracian Bulgarians: 50,000–60,000 (jan 1, 1913 – dec 30, 1913)

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The Destruction of the Thracian Bulgarians (also known as the Expulsion of the Thracian Bulgarians or "Razorenieto") was carried out by the Ottoman Empire (Young Turk government and Ottoman regular army), Ottoman paramilitary forces (Special Organization units), and local Greek forces against the Bulgarian population of Eastern and Western Thrace between July 20, 1913 (start of Ottoman military campaign) and late 1913 (though expulsions and persecution continued into 1914 and beyond), with an estimated death toll between 15,960 (Carnegie Commission figure for those "killed, burned in the houses or scattered among the mountains") and 60,000 (upper estimates for direct killings, with total forced displacement affecting approximately 200,000 Bulgarians who were killed or forced to leave their homes).

The Ottoman Empire and allied forces also engaged in mass executions, burning of villages and homes (entire villages razed), systematic massacres, rape and sexual violence, forced deportation and ethnic cleansing, destruction of churches, torture, confiscation of property, death marches, starvation, arbitrary killings, collective punishment, forced labor levies, tax coercion to force emigration, and complete destruction of Bulgarian communities (the entire Bulgarian community in Eastern and Western Thrace was wiped out as a distinct ethnic presence).

It has been labeled as genocide or ethnic cleansing by Bulgarian academician and historian Lyubomir Miletich (whose 1918 book "The Destruction of Thracian Bulgarians in 1913" documented the atrocities as mass extermination and ethnic cleansing and estimated up to 200,000 killed or forcibly deported), the Carnegie Commission (which documented the events in their 1914 report on the Balkan Wars), genocide scholar Uğur Ümit Üngör (who wrote in the Journal of Genocide Research that the CUP experimented with methods of mass expulsion for the first time during the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars and that the success of these methods contributed to their renewed application in World War I, positioning this as "A Prelude to Genocide").

Legal scholars who cite the destruction of Thracian Bulgarians as evidence of genocidal patterns in the late Ottoman period, historians who characterize it as ethnic cleansing that prefigured later genocides, and numerous Bulgarian and international historians, though the classification as "genocide" in the strict legal sense remains debated, with most scholars agreeing it constitutes ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and no countries have formally recognised it as genocide.

Historians increasingly view the Destruction of the Thracian Bulgarians as a prototype for subsequent Ottoman campaigns of ethnic cleansing, serving as a testing ground for the mass violence techniques that would be employed on a much larger scale during the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides of World War I. While the legal classification as "genocide" remains contested among scholars, there is consensus that these events constituted ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity targeting Bulgarian civilians for elimination based on their ethnicity.

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