Turks in the Balkans in the context of "Turks (term for Muslims)"

Bulgarian Turks (Bulgarian: български турци; Turkish: Bulgaristan Türkleri) are ethnic Turkish people from Bulgaria. According to the 2021 census, there were 508,375 Bulgarians of Turkish descent, roughly 8.4% of the population, making them the country's largest ethnic minority. Bulgarian Turks also comprise the largest single population of Turks in the Balkans. They primarily live in the southern province of Kardzhali and the northeastern provinces of Shumen, Silistra, Razgrad and Targovishte. There is also a diaspora outside Bulgaria in countries such as Turkey, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Romania, the most significant of which are the Bulgarian Turks in Turkey.

Bulgarian Turks are the descendants of Turkish settlers who entered the region after the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, as well as Bulgarian converts to Islam who became Turkified during the centuries of Ottoman rule. However, it has also been suggested that some Turks living today in Bulgaria may be direct ethnic descendants of earlier medieval Pecheneg, Oghuz, and Cuman Turkic tribes. According to local tradition, following a resettlement policy Karamanid Turks (mainly from the Konya Vilayet, Nevşehir Vilayet and Niğde Vilayet of the Karaman Province) were settled mainly in the Kardzhali area by the sultans Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim and Mahmud II. The Turkish community became an ethnic minority when the Principality of Bulgaria was established after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. This community is of Turkish ethnic consciousness and differs from the majority Bulgarian ethnicity and the rest of the Bulgarian nation by its own language, religion, culture, customs, and traditions.

Turkology (or Turcology or Turkic studies) is a complex of humanities sciences studying languages, history, literature, folklore, culture, and ethnology of people speaking Turkic languages and the Turkic peoples in chronological and comparative context. That includes ethnic groups from the Sakha, in eastern Siberia, to the Turks in the Balkans and the Gagauz, in Moldova.