Pomaks is a term used for Slavic Muslims inhabiting Bulgaria, northeastern Greece and mainly northwestern Turkey. The ca. 220,000 strong ethno-confessional minority in Bulgaria is known officially as Bulgarian Muslims. The term has also been used as a wider designation, including also the Slavic Muslim populations of North Macedonia and Albania.
Rûm, also transliterated as Roum, is a generic word historically used to describe:
More than 96% of population of Bosnia and Herzegovina belongs to one of its three autochthonous constituent peoples: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. The term constituent refers to the fact that these three ethnic groups are explicitly mentioned in the constitution, and that none of them can be considered a minority or immigrant. The most easily recognizable feature that distinguishes the three ethnic groups is their religion, with Bosniaks predominantly Muslim, Serbs predominantly Orthodox Christians, and Croats Catholic.
Muslims or Muslimans as a designation for a particular ethnic group, refers to one of six officially recognized constituent peoples of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The term was adopted in 1971, as an official designation of ethnicity for Yugoslav Slavic Muslims, thus grouping together a number of distinct South Slavic communities of Islamic ethnocultural tradition, among them most numerous being the modern Bosniaks of Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with some smaller groups of different ethnicity, such as Gorani and Torbeši. This designation did not include Yugoslav non-Slavic Muslims, such as Albanians, Turks and Romani.
A multinational state is a sovereign state that comprises two or more nations or states. This contrasts a nation state, where a single nation accounts for the bulk of the population. Depending on the definition of "nation", a multinational state might also be multicultural or multilingual.
In the Ottoman Empire, a millet was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which a confessional community was allowed to rule itself under its own laws.
Kemalism, also known as Atatürkism, or the Six Arrows, is the founding ideology of the Republic of Turkey. Kemalism, as it was implemented by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was defined by sweeping political, social, cultural and religious reforms designed to separate the new Turkish state from its Ottoman predecessor and embrace a modernized lifestyle, including the establishment of democracy, secularism, state support of the sciences and free education, many of which were first introduced to Turkey during Atatürk's presidency in his reforms.
The history of Ottoman Bulgaria spans nearly 500 years, from the conquest by the Ottoman Empire of the smaller kingdoms emerging from the disintegrating Second Bulgarian Empire in the late 14th century, to the Liberation of Bulgaria in 1878. As a result of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), the Principality of Bulgaria, a self-governing Ottoman vassal state that was functionally independent, was created. In 1885 the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia came under the control of the Bulgarian Tsar. Bulgaria declared independence in 1908.
Assyrians/Syriacs in Turkey are an indigenous Semitic-speaking ethnic group and minority of Turkey with a presence in the region dating to as far back as the 25th century BC, making them the oldest ethnic group in the nation. Some regions of what is now south eastern Turkey were an integral part of Assyria from the 25th century BC to the 7th century AD, including its final capital, Harran.
Confessionalism is a system of government that is a de jure mix of religion and politics. It typically entails distributing political and institutional power proportionally among confessional communities.
Ottomanism was a concept which developed prior to the 1876-1878 First Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire. Its proponents believed that it could solve the social issues that the empire was facing.
Under the Ottoman Empire's millet system, Christians and Jews were considered dhimmi under Ottoman law in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of the jizya tax.
Armenian national awakening is similar to other non-Turkish ethnic groups during the rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire in development of ideas of nationalism, salvation and independence in Armenia, as the Ottoman Empire tried to cover the social needs by creating the Tanzimat era, the development of Ottomanism and First Constitutional Era. However, the coexistence of the communities under Ottomanism proved to be a dysfunctional solution as did the Second Constitutional Era which also ignited the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman casualties of World War I covers the civilian and military casualties of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Empire's casualties were enormous regardless of the method used in the calculations. The military casualties were published in the book Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War, but the post-war partitioning of the Ottoman Empire made the estimation of the total civilian casualties harder. Also, it was not a novelty in world history to see from time to time people forced to move from one region to another, be it in the form of refugees, of population transfer, or of search for political asylum, but World War I and its aftermath caused migrations at unprecedented large scales, including the Ottoman Empire citizens.
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire mostly belonged to either the Armenian Apostolic Church or the Armenian Catholic Church. They were part of the Armenian millet until the Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century equalized all Ottoman citizens before the law.
Ottoman Greeks were ethnic Greeks who lived in the Ottoman Empire (1299–1923), the Republic of Turkey's predecessor. Ottoman Greeks, who were Greek Orthodox Christians, belonged to the Rum Millet. They were concentrated in what is today modern Greece, eastern Thrace, western Asia Minor, central Anatolia, and northeastern Anatolia. There were also sizeable Greek communities elsewhere in the Ottoman Balkans, Ottoman Armenia, and the Ottoman Caucasus, including in what, between 1878 and 1917, made up the Russian Caucasus province of Kars Oblast, in which Pontic Greeks, northeastern Anatolian Greeks, and Caucasus Greeks who had collaborated with the Russian Imperial Army in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–1829 were settled in over 70 villages, as part of official Russian policy to re-populate with Orthodox Christians an area that was traditionally made up of Ottoman Muslims and Armenians.
In AD 1453, the city of Constantinople, the capital and last stronghold of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottoman Empire. By this time Egypt had been under Muslim control for some seven centuries. Jerusalem had been conquered by the Umayyad Muslims in 638, won back by Rome in 1099 under the First Crusade and then reconquered by Saladin's forces during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1187. Later in the Sixth Crusade, it was taken back by the Catholics once again. It was conquered by the Ottomans in 1517. Orthodoxy, however, was very strong in Russia which had recently acquired an autocephalous status; and thus Moscow called itself the Third Rome, as the cultural heir of Constantinople. Under Ottoman rule, the Greek Orthodox Church acquired power as an autonomous millet. The ecumenical patriarch was the religious and administrative ruler of the entire "Greek Orthodox nation", which encompassed all the Eastern Orthodox subjects of the Empire.
Rūm millet, or "Roman nation", was the name of the Eastern Orthodox Christian community in the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the Christians were conquered by Islam, but enjoyed a certain internal autonomy.
Bulgarian Millet or Bulgar Millet was an ethno-religious and linguistic community within the Ottoman Empire from the mid-19th to early 20th century. The semi-official term Bulgarian millet, was used by the Sultan for the first time in 1847, and was his tacit consent to a more ethno-linguistic definition of the Bulgarians as a nation. Officially as a separate Millet in 1860 were recognized the Bulgarian Uniates, and then in 1870 the Bulgarian Orthodox Christians. At that time the classical Ottoman Millet-system began to degrade with the continuous identification of the religious creed with ethnic identity and the term millet was used as a synonym of nation. In this way, in the struggle for recognition of a separate Church, the modern Bulgarian nation was created. The establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, meant in practice official recognition of a separate Bulgarian nationality, and in this case the religious affiliation became a consequence of national allegiance. The founding of an independent church, along with the revival of Bulgarian language and education, were the crucial factors that strengthened the national consciousness and revolutionary struggle, that led to the creation of an independent nation-state in 1878.
The ethnonym Turks has been commonly used by the non-Muslim Balkan peoples to denote all Muslim settlers in the region, regardless of their ethno-linguistic background. Majority of these, however, were indeed ethnic Turks. In the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic faith was the official religion, with Muslims holding different rights than non-Muslims. Non-Muslim (dhimmi) ethno-religious legal groups were identified by different millets ("nations").
