Torbeši in the context of "Slav"

The Slavs or Slavic people are a major ethnic group in Europe. They speak Slavic languages and preserve Slavic culture. There are 13 Slavic countries in Europe, which include: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria; the Slavs comprise a population of around 300 million people. There are three different Slavic ethnic groups: the West Slavs, the East Slavs, and the South Slavs; the Poles, Silesians, Kashubians, Sorbs, Czechs, and Slovaks are West Slavs; Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Rusyns are East Slavs; while Slovenes, Resians, Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, Montenegrins, Torlakians, the Gorani, the Torbeši, Macedonians, and Bulgarians are South Slavs. Slavs are geographically distributed throughout the northern parts of Eurasia; they predominantly inhabit Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, and Northern Asia, though there is a large Slavic minority scattered across the Baltic states and Central Asia, and a substantial Slavic diaspora in the Americas, Western Europe, and Northern Europe.

Early Slavs lived during the Migration Period and the Early Middle Ages (approximately from the 5th to the 10th century AD), and came to control large parts of Central, Eastern, and Southeast Europe between the sixth and seventh centuries. Beginning in the 7th century, they were gradually Christianized. By the 12th century, they formed the core population of a number of medieval Christian states: East Slavs in the Kievan Rus', South Slavs in the Bulgarian Empire, the Principality of Serbia, the Duchy of Croatia and the Banate of Bosnia, and West Slavs in the Principality of Nitra, Great Moravia, the Duchy of Bohemia, and the Kingdom of Poland.

Muslims (Serbo-Croatian Latin and Slovene: Muslimani, Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic and Macedonian: Муслимани) are an ethnoreligious group of Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims, inhabiting mostly the territory of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The term Muslims became widely used for the Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims in the early 1900s. It gained official recognition in the 1910 census. The 1971 amendment to the Constitution of Yugoslavia also recognised them as a distinct nationality. It grouped several distinct South Slavic communities of Islamic ethnocultural tradition. Before 1993, a vast majority of present-day Bosniaks self-identified as ethnic Muslims, along with some smaller groups of different ethnicities, such as Gorani and Torbeši. This designation did not include non-Slavic Yugoslav Muslims, such as Albanians, Turks and some Romani people.

Reka (Macedonian: Река, Albanian: Reka) is a geographical region in Macedonia, which encompasses a quadrangle with Albania in the west, the town of Debar and the Mavrovo mountain, and Kičevo in North Macedonia in the east. The region is home to a demographically mixed population of Mijaks (Macedonians; Torbeši or Macedonian Muslims) and Albanians. The sub-regions (ethnographic/geographic regions) of Reka are Mala (Small), Dolna (Lower) and Golema (Large) or Gorna (Upper). The name Reka is Slavic in origin meaning "river".

The adjacent Lower Reka region is inhabited by Macedonian Muslims (known as "Torbeši" or "Turks" i.e. Muslims), whereas a minority are Orthodox Macedonians. Small Reka, meanwhile, is inhabited solely by Orthodox Macedonians and the populations of Small and Lower Reka belong to the Slavic ethnographic group of Mijaks, who speak the Macedonian Reka dialect. In Upper Reka, Muslim Albanians have become its remaining population, after the Albanian speaking Orthodox Christians, who in the modern period self identify as Macedonians, migrated from the region.