This was also a time for re-drawing borders in the Balkans. For the past century the European Powers had been engaged with the Eastern Question, of how to deal with the slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire; and following the 1878 Congress of Berlin, the Great Powers in 1881 forced the Ottomans to cede Thessaly to Greece. This brought the northern border closer to the southern border of the newly established autonomous principality of Bulgaria. The two young nations now faced each other across a strip of Ottoman territory inhabited by a patchwork of communities speaking demotic Greek, Bulgarian, Aromanian and Albanian.