Yet this was the Balkans. What would happen when they forcibly crammed together people whose languages, ethnicities, customs, and religions were utterly different?
The people here cherished freedom, were steeped in martial spirit, and were considered far removed from the civilized world, deeply influenced by clans and religion.
Outsiders and locals were locked in conflicts that would not end until one side died. Coupled with the ethnic migration policies of Greece and the Ottoman Empire, this led to multi-sided melees, entire families being slaughtered, and even exterminations of whole peoples occurring from time to time.
Large-scale armed brawls could draw several thousand participants, and after only a few such clashes, several villages might be wiped out. Smaller armed brawls were no less brutal, often continuing until one clan had been completely killed off.
Of those lucky enough to survive such brawls, a considerable number chose revenge. Some even chose to take indiscriminate revenge upon the whole world.
Thus shepherd boys and young girls often vanished for no reason. Even walking down the middle of a main road in broad daylight, one could have their head blown off without warning; even stepping outside to relieve oneself at night carried the risk of having one's throat slit.
If the Czechs dared to pull their lying-on-the-railway-tracks routine here, they would be crushed into meat paste on the spot.
By comparison, the ethnic minorities within the Austrian Empire were simply model students—obedient and harmless to an almost absurd degree.
Otto I had weathered no small number of storms in Greece over the years, even losing one of his arms in the process.
But the officials he had recruited from the various German states had never seen anything like this. They were all run ragged, scrambling until their heads spun.
Yet Otto I's imperial envoy