Oghuz branch
Balkan Turks
Turk communities of south-eastern Europe, settled in the Balkans since the Ottoman period and today living in several states.
Balkan Türkleri / Rumeli Türkleri
Balkan Turks are the Turk communities of south-eastern Europe — in Bulgaria, Western Thrace in Greece, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Romania’s Dobruja region. Their ancestors settled in the Balkans from the 14th century onward, as Ottoman rule extended over the region known in Turkish as Rumeli, and their speech forms the Balkan or Rumelian group of Turkish dialects. As borders changed in the 19th and 20th centuries, many families moved to Türkiye, while others remained as minorities in the new states.
In Bulgaria, Turks have lived mainly in the north-east and in the Kardzhali region of the Eastern Rhodopes. In 1984 the communist authorities restricted the public use of Turkish and religious practice, and in the winter of 1984–1985 they forced Turks to replace their Turkish and Muslim names with Bulgarian ones, in the campaign known as the “Revival Process”. After protests in May 1989 the border with Türkiye was opened, and a mass departure followed between June and August 1989; many later returned. The campaign was officially repudiated on 29 December 1989, a law of March 1990 restored the right to original names, and in 2012 Bulgaria’s National Assembly adopted a declaration condemning the assimilation campaign.
In Greece, the Muslim inhabitants of Western Thrace — a community that includes Turks, Pomaks and Roma, centred on Komotini and Xanthi — were exempted from the 1923 Greek–Turkish population exchange. In North Macedonia, the constitutional amendments of 2001 name the Turkish people among the country’s communities; in Kosovo, Turkish has the status of an official language at municipal level in Prizren; and in Romania, Turks are a recognised national minority living mainly in Dobruja, around Constanța.
- Language
- Balkan (Rumelian) dialects of Turkish, of the Oghuz branch, close to the Turkish of Türkiye
- Branch
- Oghuz
- Homeland
- Bulgaria, Western Thrace in north-eastern Greece, North Macedonia, Kosovo and the Dobruja region of Romania
- Also living in
- Türkiye, where many Balkan Turk families settled during the 19th and 20th centuries, and Western Europe
Key dates
14th–15th centuries
Ottoman expansion into the Balkans brings Turk settlement across Rumeli.
1878
The Treaty of Berlin creates an autonomous Bulgarian principality and gives Northern Dobruja to Romania; Turk communities there become minorities in the new states.
30 January 1923
The Lausanne Convention on the exchange of populations exempts the Muslim inhabitants of Western Thrace from the exchange.
1984–1985
Bulgaria’s communist authorities force Turks to change their names as part of the “Revival Process”.
1989–1990
Mass departure of Bulgarian Turks to Türkiye (June–August 1989); the campaign is repudiated on 29 December 1989, and a law of March 1990 restores original names.
Heritage
- “Spring celebration, Hıdrellez”, inscribed by North Macedonia and Türkiye on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (2017)
- Ottoman-era monuments such as the 16th-century Esmahan Sultan Mosque in Mangalia, on Romania’s Black Sea coast
- Long-established Turk towns and districts such as Kardzhali, Komotini and Prizren
Sources
- A. Eminov, Turkish and Other Muslim Minorities in Bulgaria (Hurst, 1997)
- Helsinki Watch, Destroying Ethnic Identity: The Expulsion of the Bulgarian Turks (1989)
- Minority Rights Group, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples, “Bulgaria: Turks”