Eastern Thrace in the context of "Odrin"

Edirne (US: /eɪˈdɪərnə, ɛˈ-/; Turkish: [e.ˈdiɾ.ne]), historically known as Orestias, Orestiada, Adrianople, or Adriana is a city in Turkey, in the northwestern part of the province of Edirne in Eastern Thrace. Situated 7 km (4.3 mi) from the Greek and 20 km (12 mi) from the Bulgarian borders, Edirne was the second capital city of the Ottoman Empire from the 1360s to 1453, before Constantinople became its capital.

The city is a commercial centre for woven textiles, silks, carpets and agricultural products and has a growing tourism industry. It is the seat of Edirne Province and Edirne District. Its population is 180,002 (2022).

The Odrysian kingdom (/oʊˈdrɪʒən/; Ancient Greek: Βασίλειον Ὀδρυσῶν), also known as Odrysia, was an ancient Thracian state that thrived between the early 5th century BC and the early 3rd / late 1st century BC. Located in present-day Bulgaria, southeastern Romania (Northern Dobruja), northern Greece and European Turkey, it was a tribal amalgam dominated by the Odrysians that was the first large political entity to develop in the eastern Balkans.

The Odrysian kingdom was founded by king Teres I, who was exploiting the collapse of the Persian presence in Europe due to the failed invasion of Greece in 480–79. Teres and his son Sitalces pursued a policy of expansion, making the kingdom one of the most powerful of its time. Throughout much of its early history it remained an ally of Athens and even joined the Peloponnesian War on its side. By 400 BC the state showed first signs of fatigue, although the skilled Cotys I initiated a brief renaissance that lasted until his murder in 360 BC.

The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey stemmed from the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved at least 1.6 million people (1,221,489 Greek Orthodox from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus, and 355,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece), most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands.

On 16 March 1922, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Yusuf Kemal Tengrişenk stated that "[t]he Ankara Government was strongly in favour of a solution that would satisfy world opinion and ensure tranquillity in its own country", and that "[i]t was ready to accept the idea of an exchange of populations between the Greeks in Asia Minor and the Muslims in Greece". Eventually, the initial request for an exchange of population came from Eleftherios Venizelos in a letter he submitted to the League of Nations on 16 October 1922, following Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War and two days after their accession of the Armistice of Mudanya. The request intended to normalize relations de jure, since the majority of surviving Greek inhabitants of Turkey had fled from recent genocidal massacres to Greece by that time already. Venizelos proposed a "compulsory exchange of Greek and Turkish populations", and asked Fridtjof Nansen to make the necessary arrangements. The new state of Turkey also envisioned the population exchange as a way to formalize and make permanent the flight of its native Greek Orthodox peoples while initiating a new exodus of a smaller number (400,000) of Muslims from Greece as a way to provide settlers for the newly depopulated Orthodox villages of Turkey. Norman M. Naimark claimed that this treaty was the last part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to create an ethnically pure homeland for the Turks. Historian Dinah Shelton similarly wrote that "the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 completed the process of the forcible transfer of the Greeks".

Bulgarian Battle of Versinikia (Bulgarian: Битката при Версиникия; Greek: Μάχη της Βερσινικίας) was a battle fought in 813 AD between the Byzantine Empire and the Bulgarian Empire, near the city of Adrianople (Edirne), in modern-day Turkey.

The Bulgarian army, led by Krum of Bulgaria, defeated the Byzantine forces. Following this defeat, Michael I Rangabe abdicated, with Leo V the Armenian taking the Byzantine throne. The battle further strengthened Bulgarian control in the region after their victory over Nikephoros I two years earlier. After the battle, the Bulgarians controlled the whole region of Eastern Thrace (until the Byzantine–Bulgarian Treaty of 815), with the exception of a few castles that remained in Byzantine control. Krum died on 13 April 814, but his muster of "5,000 iron-plated wagons [ . . . ] to carry the siege equipment" alarmed the Byzantine court to such an effect that they asked for the aid of the Carolingian Emperor Louis the Pious. These large-scale military preparations were Krum's attempt to avenge his failure at the Second Bulgarian Siege of Constantinople one year prior.

The Turkish communities in the former Ottoman Empire refers to ethnic Turks, who are the descendants of Ottoman-Turkish settlers from Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, living outside of the modern borders of the Republic of Turkey and in the independent states which were formerly part of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, they are not considered part of Turkey's modern diaspora, rather, due to living for centuries in their respective regions (and for centuries under Turkish rule), they are now considered "natives" or "locals" as they have been living in these countries prior to the independence and establishment of the modern-nation states.

Today, whilst the Turkish people form a majority in the Republic of Turkey and Northern Cyprus, they also form one of the "Two Communities" in the Republic of Cyprus, as well as significant minorities in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Levant, the Middle East and North Africa. Consequently, the Turkish ethnicity and/or language is officially recognised under the constitutional law of several states, particularly in the Balkans.

Thracians or Thracian Bulgarians (Bulgarian: Тракийски българи or Тракийци) are a regional, ethnographic group of ethnic Bulgarians, inhabiting or native to Thrace. Today, the larger part of this population is concentrated in Northern Thrace, but much is spread across the whole of Bulgaria and the diaspora.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century the Thracian Bulgarians were scattered in the whole of Thrace, then part of the Ottoman Empire. After the persecutions during the Preobrazhenie Uprising and the ethnic cleansing, caused to the Bulgarian population in Eastern Thrace after the Second Balkan War, these people were expelled from the area. After World War I, Bulgaria was required to cede Western Thrace to Greece. A whole population of Bulgarians in Western Thrace was expelled into Bulgaria-controlled Northern Thrace. This was followed by a further population exchange between Bulgaria and Greece (under the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine), which radically changed the demographics of the region toward increased ethnic homogenization within the territories each respective country ultimately was awarded. At this period the Bulgarian Communist Party was compelled by Comintern to accept the formation of a new Thracian nation on the base of this people in order to include them in a new separate Thracian state, as a part of a future Balkan Communist Federation.

Greek refugees is a collective term used to refer to the more than one million Greek Orthodox natives of Asia Minor, Thrace and the Black Sea areas who fled during the Greek genocide (1914-1923) and Greece's later defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), as well as remaining Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Turkey who were required to leave their homes for Greece shortly thereafter as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which formalized the population transfer and barred the return of the refugees. This Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations was signed in Lausanne, on January 30, 1923 as part of the peace treaty between Greece and Turkey and required all remaining Orthodox Christians in Turkey, regardless of what language they spoke, be relocated to Greece with the exception of those in Istanbul and two nearby islands. Although the term has been used in various times to refer to fleeing populations of Greek descent (primarily after the Ionian Revolt, the Fall of Constantinople or the Greek Civil War), the population strength and the influence of the Asia Minor Greeks in Greece itself, has attached the term to the Anatolian Greek population of the early 20th century. At least 300,000 Greek refugees were from Eastern Thrace, whereas at least 900,000 were from Asia Minor. At least 150,000 were from Istanbul, who left the city in three years before 1928.