Pomaks in the context of "Muslim minority of Greece"

Bulgarians in Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye'deki Bulgarlar, Bulgarian: Българи в Турция) form a minority of Turkey. They are Bulgarian expatriates in Turkey or Turkish citizens who were born there of full or partially Bulgarian descent. People of Bulgarian ancestry include a large number from the Pomak and a very small number of Orthodox of ethnic Bulgarian origin. Bulgarian Christians are officially recognized as a minority by the Turkey-Bulgaria Friendship Treaty of 18 October 1925.

Prior to the ethnic cleansing of Thracian Bulgarians in 1913, the Christian Bulgarians had been more than the Pomaks, afterwards Pomak refugees arrived from Greece and Bulgaria. Pomaks are also Muslim and speak a Bulgarian dialect. According to Ethnologue at present 300,000 Pomaks in European Turkey speak Bulgarian as their mother tongue.It is very hard to estimate the number of Pomaks along with the Turkified Pomaks who live in Turkey, as they have blended into the Turkish society and have been often linguistically and culturally assimilated. According to Milliyet and Turkish Daily News reports, the number of the Pomaks is 600,000. The origin of the Pomaks has been debated, but there is an academic consensus that they are descendants of native Bulgarians who converted to Islam during the Ottoman rule of the Balkans.

The Balkan Turks or Rumelian Turks (Turkish: Balkan Türkleri) are the Turkish people who have been living in the Balkans since Ottoman rule, as well as their descendants who still live in the region today. The Turks are officially recognized as a minority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Romania; in Greece the Turkish minority is recognized as "Greek Muslims". Furthermore, the Turkish language has minority language status in Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Romania. The Ottoman Empire conquered parts of the Balkans between the 14th and the 16th centuries.

Historically, from the Ottoman conquest until the 19th century, ethnically non-Turkish, especially South Slavic Muslims of the Balkans were referred to in the local languages as Turks (term for Muslims). This usage is common in literature, such as in the works of Ivan Mažuranić and Petar II Petrović-Njegoš. Today, the largest mainly Muslim Slavic ethnic group is known as the Bosniaks followed by Pomaks.

Demographic features of the population of Turkey include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population. As of 1 July 2025, the population of Turkey was over 85.8 million with an annual growth rate of 0.36%. This official population number excludes the registered Syrian refugees under temporary protection status which have a population of about 2.6 million as of the date.

Turks are the largest ethnic group, comprising 70–75% of the population while Kurds are the second largest with 19%. The others, including Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Chechens, Georgians, Greeks, Pomaks, Rum, Russians, Romani, Jews, Laz people and others make 6–11% of the population according to a 2016 estimate by the CIA.

Minorities in Greece are small in size compared to Balkan regional standards, and the country is largely ethnically homogeneous. This is mainly due to the population exchanges between Greece and neighboring Turkey (Convention of Lausanne) and Bulgaria (Treaty of Neuilly), which removed most Muslims (with the exception of the Muslims of Western Thrace) and those Christian Slavs who did not identify as Greeks from Greek territory. The treaty also provided for the resettlement of ethnic Greeks from those countries, later to be followed by refugees. There is no official information for the size of the ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities because asking the population questions pertaining to the topic have been abolished since 1951.

The main officially recognized "minority" (μειονότητα, meionótita) is the Muslim minority (μουσουλμανική μειονότητα, mousoulmanikí meionótita) in Thrace, Northern Greece, which numbered 120,000 according to the 2001 census and mainly consists of Western Thrace Turks, Pomaks (both mainly inhabiting Western Thrace), and also Romani, found particularly in central and Northern Greece. Other recognized minority groups are the Armenians numbering approximately 35,000, and the Jews (Sephardim and Romaniotes) numbering approximately 5,500.

Petrevene (Bulgarian: Петревене, pronounced [ˈpɛtrɛvɛnɛ] or [pɛtrɛˈvɛnɛ]) is a village in North Central Bulgaria.It is situated on the left bank of Panega river (Bulgarian: Панега, also: Zlatna Panega, Bulgarian: Златна Панега, 'Golden Panega', old: Paneg, Altǎn Paneg). It is in the Municipality of Lukovit, part of the District of Lovech, and is 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) away from the municipality center of Lukovit. The main road E-83 and the railroad Cherven Bryag—Zlatna Panega pass through it.

Historical records of the settlement date back to the early 15th century, during the Ottoman Empire, although evidence from the surrounding areas indicate the area was likely settled much earlier. Historically, it has been an important part of the marble trade, and is notable for its long history of shifting Pomak Muslim and Christian village populations and tensions.

European Islam, or Euro-Islam, is a hypothesized new branch of Islam that historically originated and developed among the European peoples of the Balkans (primarily Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and European Turkey, but also in Bulgaria, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, countries with sizable Muslim minorities). These communities, alongside those in some republics of Russia, constitute a large population which constitute large populations of European Muslims. Historically significant Muslim populations in Europe include Azerbaijanis, Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians, Balkan Turks, Bosniaks, Böszörmény, Chechens, Circassians, Cretan Turks, Crimean Tatars, Gajals, Gorani, Greek Muslims, Ingush, Khalyzians, Kazakhs, Lipka Tatars, Muslim Albanians, Muslim Romani people, Pomaks, Torbeshi, Turks, Turkish Cypriots, Vallahades, Volga Tatars, Yörüks, and Megleno-Romanians from Notia today living in East Thrace, although the majority are secular.

The terms "European Islam" and "Euro-Islam" were originally introduced at a conference that took place in Birmingham in 1988, presided by Carl E. Olivestam, senior lecturer at Umeå University, and subsequently published in the Swedish handbook Kyrkor och alternativa rörelser ("Churches and Alternative Movements"). "European Islam" defines the ongoing debate on the social integration of Muslim populations in Western European countries such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. There are three Islamic scholars who participate in the debate on "Euro-Islam": Enes Karić, Bassam Tibi, and Tariq Ramadan, who adopted the term in the second half of the 1990s but use it with different meanings. The foremost Western, Non-Muslim scholars of political science and/or Islamic studies involved in the debate on "Euro-Islam" are Jocelyne Cesari, Jørgen S. Nielsen, and Olivier Roy.

Muhacir is a term referring to Ottoman Muslim citizens and their descendants born after the onset of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Muhacirs overwhelmingly self-identified as Muslims and their numbers are estimated in the millions. The refugees from Macedonia, Bulgaria, and parts of Serbia had primarily Anatolian Turkish background. Other backgrounds included Albanians, Bosniaks, Chechens, Circassians, Crimean Tatars, Pomaks, Macedonian Muslims, Greek Muslims, Serb Muslims, Georgian Muslims, Ossetian Muslims and Muslim Roma.

They immigrated to modern-day Turkey, mostly in the 19th and early 20th centuries to escape the persecution of Ottoman Muslims by Christians in territories formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Further migration from Bulgaria occurred from 1940 to 1990. Up to a third of the modern-day population of Turkey may have ancestry from these Turkish and other Muslim migrants.

Pomak language (Greek: πομακική γλώσσα, pomakiki glosa or πομακικά, pomakika; Bulgarian: помашки език, pomaški ezik; Turkish: Pomakça) is a term used in Greece and Turkey to refer to some of the Rup dialects of the Bulgarian language spoken by the Pomaks of Western Thrace in Greece and Eastern Thrace in Turkey. These dialects are native also in Bulgaria, and are classified as part of the Smolyan subdialect. Not all Pomaks speak this dialect as their mother language.