The decisive Battle of Kleidion was fought close the river in 1014 between the Bulgarians under Emperor Samuel and the Byzantines under Emperor Basil II and determined the fall of the First Bulgarian Empire four years later . In 1913 , the Greek Army was nearly surrounded in the Kresna Gorge of the Struma by the Bulgarian Army during the Second Balkan War , and the Greeks were forced to ask for armistice . The river valley was part of the Macedonian front in World War I . The ship , which took Jewish refugees out of Romania in World War II and was torpedoed and sunk in the Black Sea , causing nearly 800 deaths , was named after the river
torpedoed and sunk
Struma disaster
Struma (river)