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During the decline and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Muslim (including Ottoman Turks, Albanians, Bosniaks, Serbs, Greek Muslims, Pomaks, Circassians) inhabitants living in territories previously under Ottoman control, often found themselves as a persecuted minority after borders were re-drawn. These populations, who enjoyed the status of a privileged minority under Ottoman hegemony, were subject to expropriation, massacres, and even ethnic cleansing. [1] [2]
The 19th century saw the rise of nationalism in the Balkans coincident with the decline of Ottoman power, which resulted in the establishment of an independent Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria and Romania. At the same time, the Russian Empire expanded into previously Ottoman-ruled or Ottoman-allied regions of the Caucasus and the Black Sea region. These conflicts created large numbers of Muslim refugees. Persecutions of Muslims resumed during World War I by the invading Russian troops in the east and during the Turkish War of Independence in the west, east, and south of Anatolia by Greeks and Armenians. After the Greco-Turkish War, a population exchange between Greece and Turkey took place, and most Greek Muslims left. During these times many Muslim refugees, called Muhacir, settled in Turkey.
For the first time, Ottoman military expeditions shifted from Anatolia to Europe and the Balkans with the occupation of the Gallipoli peninsula in the 1350s. [3] After the region was conquered by the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the Turkish presence grew. Some of the settlers were Yörüks, nomads who quickly became sedentary, and others were from urban classes. They settled in almost all of the towns, but the majority of them settled in the Eastern Balkans. The main areas of settlement were Ludogorie, Dobrudzha, the Thracian plain, the mountains and plains of northern Greece and Eastern Macedonia around the Vardar river.
Between the 15th and 17th centuries, large numbers of native Balkan peoples converted to Islam. Places of mass conversions were in Bosnia, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Crete, and the Rhodope Mountains. [4] Some of the native population converted to Islam and became Turkish over time, mainly those in Anatolia. [5]
Hall points out that atrocities were committed by all sides during the Balkan conflicts. Deliberate terror was designed to instigate population movements out of particular territories. The aim of targeting the civilian population was to carve ethnically homogeneous countries. [6]
Even before the Great Turkish War (1683—1699) Austrians and Venetians supported Christian irregulars and rebellious highlanders of Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania to raid Muslim Slavs. [7]
The end of the Great Turkish War marked the first time the Ottoman Empire lost large areas of territory to Christians. Most of Hungary, Podolia, and the Morea was lost. The Ottomans regained the Morea quickly, and Muslims soon became part of the population or were never thoroughly displaced in the first place.
Most of the Christians who lived in the Ottoman Empire were Orthodox, so Russia was particularly interested in them. In 1711 Peter the Great invited Balkan Christians to revolt against Ottoman Muslim rule. [8]
About one quarter of all people living in Slavonia in the 16th century were Muslims who mostly lived in towns, with Osijek and Požega being the largest Muslim settlements. [9] Like other Muslims who lived in Croatia (Lika and Kordun) and Dalmatia, they were all forced to leave their homes by the end of 1699. This was the first example of the cleansing of Muslims in this region. This cleansing of Muslims "enjoyed the benediction of Catholic church". Around 130,000 Muslims from Croatia and Slavonia were driven to Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina. [10] [11] Basically, all Muslims who lived in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia were either forced to exile, murdered or enslaved. [12]
Thousands of Serb refugees crossed Danube and populated territories of Habsburg Monarchy left by Muslims. Leopold I granted ethno-religious autonomy to them without giving any privileges to the remaining Muslim population who therefore fled to Bosnia, Herzegovina and Serbia spreading anti-Christian sentiment among other Muslims there. [13] The relations between non-Muslim and Muslim population of Ottoman held Balkans became progressively worse. [14]
At the beginning of the 18th century remaining Muslims of Slavonia moved to Posavina. [15] [16] The Ottoman authorities encouraged hopes of expelled Muslims for a quick return to their homes and settled them in the border regions. [17] The Muslims comprised about 2/3 population of Lika. All of them, like Muslims who lived in other parts of Croatia, were forced to convert to Catholicism or to be expelled. [18] Almost all buildings that belonged to Muslim religion and culture were destroyed in the region of Croatia after Muslims had to leave it. [19]
In 1716, Austria occupied northern Bosnia alongside northern Serbia until 1739 when those lands were ceded back to the Ottoman Empire at the Treaty of Belgrade. During this era, the Austrian Empire outlined its position to the Bosnian Muslim population about living within its administration. Two options were offered by Charles VI such as a conversion to Christianity while retaining property and remaining on Austrian territory, or for a departure of those remaining Muslim to other lands. [20]
At the beginning of the 18th century (1709 or 1711) Orthodox Serbs massacred their Muslim neighbors in Montenegro. [21] [22]
After the Dahije , renegade janissaries who defied the Sultan and ruled the Sanjak of Smederevo in tyranny (beginning in 1801), imposing harsh taxes and forced labour, went on to execute leading Serbs throughout the sanjak in 1804, the Serbs rose up against the Dahije. The revolt, known as the First Serbian Uprising, subsequently reached national level after the quick success of the Serbs. The Porte, seeing the Serbs as a threat, ordered their disbandment. The revolutionaries took over Belgrade in 1806 where an armed uprising against a Muslim garrison, including civilians, took place. [23] During the uprising urban centers with sizeable Muslim populations were violently targeted such as Užice and Valjevo, as the Serbian peasantry held a class hatred of the urban Muslim elite. [24] [25] In the end, Serbia became an autonomous country with most of the Muslims been expelled. [26] During the revolts 15,000–20,000 Muslims fled or were expelled. [27] In Belgrade and the rest of Serbia there remained a Muslim population of some 23,000 who were also forcibly expelled after 1862, following a massacre of Serbian civilians by Ottoman soldiers near Kalemegdan. [25] [28] Some Muslim families then migrated and resettled in Bosnia, where their descendants today reside in urban centres such as Šamac, Tuzla, Foča and Sarajevo. [29] [30]
In 1821, a major Greek revolt broke out in Southern Greece. Insurgents gained control of most of the countryside while the Muslims and Jews sheltered themselves in the fortified towns and castles. [31] Each one of them was besieged and gradually through starvation or surrender most were taken over by the Greeks. In the massacres of April 1821 some 15,000 were killed. [31] The worst massacre happened in Tripolitsa, some 8,000 Muslims and Jews died. [31] In response, massive reprisals against Greeks in Constantinople, Smyrna, Cyprus, and elsewhere, took place; thousands were killed and the Ottoman Sultan even considered a policy of total extermination of all Greeks in the Empire. [32] In the end an independent Greece was set up. Most of the Muslims in its area had been killed or expelled during the conflict. [31] British historian William St Clair argues that what he calls "the genocidal process" ended when there were no more Turks to kill in what would become independent Greece. [32]
In 1876 a Bulgarian uprising broke out in dozens of villages. The first attacks were made against the local Muslims [33] but in a short time the Ottomans violently suppressed the uprising.
The Bulgarian uprising eventually lead to a war between Russia and the Ottomans. Russia invaded the Ottoman Balkans through Dobrudzha and northern Bulgaria attacking the Muslim population. In this war the Ottomans were defeated and in the process a large part of the Turks of Bulgaria fled to Anatolia and Constantinople. It was a cold winter and a large part of them died. Some of them returned after the war but most of these left again. The Bulgarian Muslims (part of them Turks) settled mostly around the Sea of Marmara. Some of them had been wealthy and they played an important part in the Ottoman elite in later years. Almost half of the pre-war 1,5 million Muslim population of Bulgaria was gone, an estimated 200,000 died and the rest fled. [34]
Migration continued in the peacetime, some 350,000 Bulgarian Muslims left the country between 1880 and 1911. [35]
On the eve of the outbreak of a second round of hostilities between Serbia and the Ottoman Empire in 1877, a notable Muslim population existed in the districts of Niš, Pirot, Vranje, Leskovac, Prokuplje and Kuršumlija. [36] The rural parts of Toplica, Kosanica, Pusta Reka and Jablanica valleys and adjoining semi-mountainous interior was inhabited by compact Muslim Albanian population while Serbs in those areas lived near the river mouths and mountain slopes and both peoples inhabited other regions of the South Morava river basin. [37] [38] The Muslim population of most of the area was composed out of ethnic Gheg Albanians and with Turks located in urban centres. [39] Part of the Turks were of Albanian origin. [40] The Muslims in the cities of Niš and Pirot were Turkish-speaking; Vranje and Leskovac were Turkish- and Albanian-speaking; Prokuplje and Kuršumlija were Albanian-speaking. [39] There was also a minority of Circassian refugees settled by the Ottomans during the 1860s, near the then border around the environs of Niš. [41] Estimates vary on the size of the Muslim population on the eve of the war within these areas ranging from as high as 200,000 to as low as 131,000. [42] [43] [44] Estimates as to the number of the Muslim refugees that left the region for the Ottoman Empire due to the war range from 60–70,000 to as low as 30,000. [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] The departure of the Albanian population from these regions was done in a manner that today would be characterized as ethnic cleansing. [51]
Hostilities between Serbian and Ottoman forces broke out on 15 December 1877, after a Russian request for Serbia to enter the Russo-Turkish war. [52] The Serbian military had two objectives: capturing Niš and breaking the Niš-Sofia Ottoman lines of communication. [53] Serbian forces entered the wider Toplica and Morava valleys capturing urban centres such as Niš, Kuršumlija, Prokuplije, Leskovac, and Vranje and their surrounding rural and mountainous districts. [54] In these regions, the Albanian population depending on the area they resided had fled into nearby mountains, leaving livestock, property and other belongings behind. [55] Some Albanians returned and submitted to Serbian authorities, while others continued their flight southward toward Ottoman Kosovo. [56] Serbian forces also encountered heavy Albanian resistance in certain areas which slowed their advance into these regions resulting in having to take villages one by one that became vacant. [57] A small Albanian population remained the Medveđa area, where their descendants still reside today. [58] The retreat of these refugees toward Ottoman Kosovo was halted at the Goljak Mountains when an armistice was declared. [57] The Albanian population was resettled in Lab area and other parts of northern Kosovo alongside the new Ottoman-Serbian border. [59] [60] [61] Most Albanian refugees were resettled in over 30 large rural settlements in central and southeastern Kosovo and in urban centres that increased their populations substantially. [59] [44] [62] Tensions between Albanian refugees and local Kosovo Albanians arose over resources, as the Ottoman Empire found it difficult to accommodate to their needs and meager conditions. [63] Tensions in the form of revenge attacks also arose by incoming Albanian refugees on local Kosovo Serbs that contributed to the beginnings of the ongoing Serbian-Albanian conflict in coming decades. [51] [63] [64]
In 1875, a conflict between Muslims and Christians broke out in Bosnia.[ citation needed ] After the Ottoman Empire signed the treaty at the 1878 Berlin Congress, Bosnia was occupied by Austria-Hungary. [65] Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) perceived this as a betrayal by the Ottomans and left on their own, felt that they were defending their homeland and not the wider Empire. [65] From 9 July until 20 October 1878 or for almost three months, Bosnian Muslims resisted Austro-Hungarian forces in nearly sixty military engagements with 5,000 casualties either wounded or killed. [65] Some Bosnian Muslims concerned about their future and well being under the new non-Muslim administration, left Bosnia for the Ottoman Empire. [65] From 1878 until 1918, between 130,000 [66] and 150,000 Bosnian Muslims departed Bosnia to areas under Ottoman control, some to the Balkans, others to Anatolia, the Levant and Maghreb. [67] Today, these Bosnian populations in the Arab world have become assimilated although they have retained memories of their origins and some bear the ethnonym Bosniak (rendered in Arabic as Bushnak ) as a surname. [68] [69]
The war continued in the east and after the peace area around Kars was ceded to Russia. This resulted in a large number of Muslims leaving and settling in remaining Ottoman lands. Batum and its surrounding area was also ceded to Russia causing many local Georgian Muslims to migrate to the west. [70] Most of them settled around the Anatolian Black Sea coast.
In 1912 Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro declared war on the Ottomans. The Ottomans quickly lost territory. According to Geert-Hinrich Ahrens, "the invading armies and Christian insurgents committed a wide range of atrocities upon the Muslim population." [71] In Kosovo and Albania most of the victims were Albanians while in other areas most of the victims were Turks and Pomaks. A large number of Pomaks in the Rhodopes were forcibly converted to Orthodoxy but later allowed to reconvert, most of them did. [72] During this war hundreds of thousands of the Turks and Pomaks fled their villages and became refugees. The Report of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars reported that in many districts the Moslem villages were systematically burned by their Christian neighbors. In Monastir 80% of the Muslim villages were burned by the Serbian and Greek army according to a British report. While in Giannitsa the Muslim quarter was burned alongside many Muslim villages in the Salonica province by the Greek army. Massacres and rapes are also reported by the Greek and Bulgarian armies towards Turks. [73] Arnold Toynbee gives the number of Muslim refugees who fled the region that fell under Bulgarian, Serbian and Greek control between 1912-1915 as 297,918. [74] Justin Mccarthy gives the number of refugees during and after the Balkan Wars (1912–20) as 413,922, and further states that in the period between 1911-1926 out of the 2,315,293 Muslims that lived in the areas taken from the Ottoman Empire in Europe (excluding Albania), 812,771 ended up in Turkey (including those of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey), 632,408 died, and 870,114 remained. [75] By 1923, only 38% of the Muslim population of 1912 still lived in the Balkans. According to Emre Erol, 410'000 Muslims were displaced to the Ottoman Empire and more than 100'000 died during their flight. [76] Salonika (Thessaloniki) and Adrianople (Edirne) were crowded with them. By sea and land mostly they settled in Ottoman Thrace and Anatolia.
Historian Uğur Ümit Üngör noted that during the Russian invasion of Ottoman lands, "many atrocities were carried out against the local Turks and Kurds by the Russian army and Armenian volunteers." [77] General Liakhov gave the order to kill any Turk on sight and destroy any mosque. [78] [79] According to Russian reports the Armenian nationalists wanted to exterminate the Muslims in the occupied regions. [80] A large part of the local Muslim Turks and Kurds fled west after the Russian invasion of 1915-1916, in Talaat Pasha's Notebook the given number is at 702,905 Turks. According to J. Rummel at least 128,000 Muslims were killed by Russian troops and Armenian irregulars during the period between 1915–1916. An Iranian ambassador argues that a further 40,000 Muslims were said to be killed by Armenian troops in the region occupied by Russian troops between 1917 and 1918, but Rummel finds this estimate not credible, and opts for the estimate of 150,000 killed instead for the period of 1915-1918. [81]
Cilicia was occupied by the British after World War I, who were later replaced by the French. The French Armenian Legion armed returning Armenian refugees of the Armenian genocide to the region and assisting them. Eventually the Turks responded with resistance against the French occupation, battles took place in Marash, Aintab, and Urfa. Most of these cities were destroyed during the process with large civilian suffering. In Marash, 4.500 Turks died. [82] The French left the area together with the Armenians after 1920. The retribution for the Armenian Genocide served as justification for armed Armenians. [83]
Also during the Franco-Turkish War, the Kaç Kaç incident occurred, which refers to the escape of 40,000 Turks from the city of Adana into more mountainous regions due to the Franco-Armenian operation of July 20th, 1920. During the escape, French-Armenian airplanes bombed the fleeing population and the Belemedik hospital.
After the Greek landing and the following occupation of Western Anatolia after World War I during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) the Turkish resistance activity was answered with terror against the local Muslims. Killings, rapes, and village burnings took place as the Greek Army advanced. [85] British intelligence reports at the time noted that the Greek army near Usak was welcomed by the Muslim population, with historians Morris and Ze'evi linking this to the disciplined behavior of the Greek army; there were cases of Greek atrocities against the Muslim population, and the perpetrators were prosecuted by the Greek army, while the "worst miscreants" were "a handful of Armenians recruited by the Greek army", who were then sent back to Constantinople. [86]
During the Greek occupation, Greek troops and local Greeks, Armenian, and Circassian groups committed the Yalova Peninsula Massacres in early 1921 against the local Muslim population. [87] These resulted, according to some sources, in the deaths of c. 300 of the local Muslim populace, as well c. 27 villages. [88] [89] Precise number of casualties is not exactly known. Statements gathered by Ottoman official, reveal a relatevely low number of casualties: based on the Ottoman enquiry to which 177 survivors responded, only 35 were reported as killed, wounded or beaten or missing. This is also in accordance with Toynbee's accounts that one to two murders were enough to drive out the population. [90] Another source estimates that barely 1.500 Muslims out of 7,000 survived in the environment of Yalova. [91]
The Greeks advanced all the way to Central Anatolia. After the Turkish attack in 1922 the Greeks retreated and Norman M. Naimark notes that "the Greek retreat was even more devastating for the local population than the occupation". [92] During the retreat, towns and villages were burned as part of a scorched earth policy, accompanied with massacres and rapes. During this war, a part of Western Anatolia was destroyed, large towns such as Manisa, Salihli together with many villages being burned. [93] 3000 houses in Alaşehir. [94] The Inter-Allied commission, consisting of British, French, American and Italian officers found that "there is a systematic plan of destruction of Turkish villages and extinction of the Muslim population." [95] According to Marjorie Housepian, 4000 Muslims were executed in Izmir under Greek occupation. [96]
The peace after the Greco–Turkish War resulted in a mutual population exchange between Greece and Turkey, between the two countries. As a result, the Muslim population of Greece, with the exceptions of Western Thrace and Muslim Cham Albanians, was relocated to Turkey. [97]
The forced mass displacement of Muslims out of the Balkans during the era of territorial contraction of the Ottoman Empire has only become a topic of recent scholarly interest in the 21st century. [98]
According to historian Justin McCarthy, between the years 1821–1922, from the beginning of the Greek War of Independence to the end of the Ottoman Empire, five million Muslims were driven from their lands and another five and a half million died, some of them killed in wars, others perishing as refugees from starvation or disease. [1]
Total Muslim deaths and refugees during these centuries are estimated to be several millions. [99] It is estimated that during the last decade of the Ottoman Empire (1912–1922) when the Balkan wars, World War I and war of Independence took place, close to 4 million Muslims, civilian and military, died in the area of modern Turkey. [100]
The Ottoman authorities and charities provided some help to the immigrants and sometimes settled them in certain locations. In Turkey most of the Balkan refugees settled in Western Turkey and Thrace. The Caucasians, in addition to these areas also settled in Central Anatolia and around the Black Sea coast. Eastern Anatolia was not largely settled with the exception of some Circassian and Karapapak villages. There were also completely new villages founded by refugees, for example in uninhabited forested areas. Many people of the 1924 exchange were settled in former Greek villages along the Aegean coast. Outside of Turkey, Circassians were settled along the Hedjaz Railway and some Cretan Muslims at Syria's coast.
According to Michael Mann McCarthy is often viewed as a scholar on the Turkish side of the debate over Balkan Muslim death figures. [101] Mann however states that even if those figures were reduced "by as much as 50 percent, they still would horrify". [101] In the discussion about the Armenian Genocide, McCarthy denies the genocide and is considered as the leading pro-Turkish scholar. [102] [103] Scholarly critics of McCarthy acknowledge that his research on Muslim civilian casualties and refugee numbers (19th and early 20th centuries) has brought forth a valuable perspective, previously neglected in the Christian West: that millions of Muslims and Jews also suffered and died during these years. [104] [105] Donald W. Bleacher, though acknowledging that McCarthy is pro-Turkish nonetheless has called his scholarly study Death and Exile on Muslim civilian casualties and refugee numbers "a necessary corrective" challenging the West's model of all victims being Christians and all perpetrators as being Muslims. [105]
Historian Mark Biondich estimates that from 1878-1912 up to two million Muslims left the Balkans either voluntarily or involuntarily while Muslims casualties in the Balkans during 1912-1923 within the context of those killed and expelled exceeded some three million. [106]
Muslim heritage was extensively targeted during the persecutions. During their long rule the Ottomans had built numerous mosques, madrasas, caravanserais, bath-houses and other types of buildings. According to current research, around 20,000 buildings of all sizes have been documented in official Ottoman registers. [107] However very few survives of this Ottoman heritage in most of the Balkan countries. [108] Most of the Ottoman era mosques of the Balkans have been destroyed and from the ones still standing at least their minarets. Before the Habsburg conquest, Osijek had 8–10 mosques none of which remain today. [109] During the Balkan wars there were cases of desecration, destruction of mosques and Muslim cemeteries. [109] Of the 166 Madrasas in the Ottoman Balkans in the 17th century only 8 remain and 5 of them are near Edirne. [107] The amount of destruction was 95–98%. [107] The same is also valid for other types of buildings, such as markethalls, caravanserais and baths. [107] From a chain of caravanserais across the Balkans only one is preserved while there are vague ruins of four others. [107] There were in the area of Negroponte in 1521: 34 large and small mosques, 6 hamams, 10 schools, 6 dervish convents. Today only the ruin of one hamam remains. [107]
Town | During Ottoman rule | Still standing |
---|---|---|
Shumen | 40 | 3 |
Serres | 60 | 3 |
Belgrade | >100 | 1 |
Sofia | >100 | 1 |
Ruse | 36 | 1 |
Sremska Mitrovica [110] | 17 | 0 |
Osijek [111] | 7 | 0 |
Požega [112] | 14—15 | 0 |
There exists literature in Turkey dealing with these events, but outside of Turkey, the events are largely unknown to the world public.
According to Mark Levene, the Victorian public in the 1870s paid much more attention to the massacres and expulsions of Christians than to massacres and expulsions of Muslims, even if on a greater scale. He further suggests that such massacres were even favored by some circles. Mark Levene also argues that the dominant powers, by supporting "nation-statism" at the Congress of Berlin, legitimized "the primary instrument of Balkan nation-building": ethnic cleansing. [113]
There is a monument in Iğdır, Turkey, called Iğdır Genocide Memorial and Museum, remembering the Muslim victims of World War I. [114]
A monument was erected in Anaklia, Georgia on 21 May 2012, to commemorate the expulsion of the Circassians. [115]
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This article includes information on the demographic history of Kosovo.
The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 was a conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Orthodox coalition led by the Russian Empire and composed of Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. Fought in the Balkans and in the Caucasus, it originated in emerging 19th-century Balkan nationalism. Additional factors included Russian goals of recovering territorial losses endured during the Crimean War of 1853–56, re-establishing itself in the Black Sea and supporting the political movement attempting to free Balkan nations from the Ottoman Empire.
The history of Kosovo is intertwined with the histories of its neighbouring regions. The name "Kosovo" is derived from the Serbian word "Kos". Black birds were full on Kosovo Plain, where the Battle of Kosovo was fought between Serbian states and the Ottoman Empire. Kosovo's modern history can be traced to the Ottoman Sanjak of Prizren, of which parts were organised into Kosovo Vilayet in 1877. In antiquity, Dardania covered the area, which formed part of the larger Roman province of Moesia in the 1st century AD. In the Middle Ages, the region became part of the Bulgarian Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Serbian medieval states. It was then conquered by the Ottoman Empire, an exact 70 years after the Battle of Kosovo. In 1913 the Kosovo Vilayet was incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbia, which in 1918 formed Yugoslavia. Kosovo gained autonomy in 1963 under Josip Broz Tito's direction. Thios autonomy was significantly extended by Yugoslavia's 1974 Constitution, but was lost in 1990. In 1999 UNMIK stepped in.
The Kingdom of Serbia was a country located in the Balkans which was created when the ruler of the Principality of Serbia, Milan I was proclaimed king in 1882.
The rise of the Western notion of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire eventually caused the breakdown of the Ottoman millet concept. An understanding of the concept of the nationhood prevalent in the Ottoman Empire, which was different from the current one as it was centered on religion, was a key factor in the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
The Vilayet of Kosovo was a first-level administrative division (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Peninsula which included the current territory of Kosovo and the north-western part of the Republic of North Macedonia. The areas today comprising Sandžak (Raška) region of Serbia and Montenegro, although de jure under Ottoman control, were in fact under Austro- Hungarian occupation from 1878 until 1909, as provided under Article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin. Uskub (Skopje) functioned as the capital of the province and the mid way point between Istanbul and its European provinces. Uskub's population of 32,000 made it the largest city in the province, followed by Prizren, also numbering at 30,000.
Muhacir or Muhajir are the estimated 10 million Ottoman Muslim citizens, and their descendants born after the onset of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, who emigrated to Thrace and Anatolia from the late 18th century until the end of the 20th century, to escape ongoing ethnic cleansing and persecution in their homelands. Today, between a third and a quarter of Turkey's population of almost 80 million have ancestry from these Muhacirs.
Muhaxhir and Muhaxher are terms borrowed from Ottoman Turkish: muhacir and derived from Arabic muhajir. The term Muhaxhir(ë) refers to Ottoman Albanian communities that left their homes as refugees or were transferred, from Greece, Serbia and Montenegro to Albania, Kosovo and to a lesser extent North Macedonia during and following various wars.
The Vilayet of Manastir was a first-level administrative division (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire, created in 1874, dissolved in 1877 and re-established in 1879. The vilayet was occupied during the First Balkan War in 1912 and divided between the Kingdom of Greece and the Kingdom of Serbia, with some parts later becoming part of the newly established Principality of Albania.
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, most of whom were forcibly made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands.
Albanisation is the spread of Albanian culture, people, and language, either by integration or assimilation. Diverse peoples were affected by Albanisation including peoples with different ethnic origins, such as Turks, Serbs, Croats, Circassians, Bosniaks, Greeks, Aromanians, Romani, Gorani, Macedonians from all the regions of the Balkans.
Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Eurasian Studies (AVIM). His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.
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 sevenths 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.
The colonization of Kosovo was a programme begun by the kingdoms of Montenegro and Serbia in the early twentieth century and later implemented by their successor state Yugoslavia at certain periods of time from the interwar era (1918–1941) until 1999. Over the course of the twentieth century, Kosovo experienced four major colonisation campaigns that aimed at altering the ethnic population balance in the region, to decrease the Albanian population and substitute them with Montenegrins and Serbs. Albanians formed the ethnic majority in the region after it became part of Yugoslavia in early 20th century.
Turco-Albanian is an ethnographic and religious term used by Greeks for Muslim Albanians from 1715 and thereafter. In a broader sense, the term included both Muslim Albanian and Turkish political and military elites of the Ottoman administration in the Balkans. The term is derived from an identification of Muslims with Ottomans and/or Turks, due to the Ottoman Empire's administrative millet system of classifying peoples according to religion, where the Muslim millet played the leading role. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the term Turk and from the late nineteenth century onwards, the derivative term Turco-Albanian has been used as a pejorative term, phrase and or expression for Muslim Albanian individuals and communities. The term has also been noted to be unclear, ideologically and sentimentally charged, and an imperialist and racialist expression. Albanians have expressed derision and disassociation toward the terms Turk and its derivative form Turco-Albanian regarding the usage of those terms in reference to them. It has been reported that at the end of the 20th century some Christian Albanians still used the term "Turk" to refer to Muslim Albanians.
Albanians in Turkey are ethnic Albanian citizens and denizens of Turkey. They consist of Albanians who arrived during the Ottoman period, Kosovar/Macedonian and Tosk Cham Albanians fleeing from Serbian and Greek persecution after the beginning of the Balkan Wars, alongside some Albanians from Montenegro and Albania proper. A 2008 report from the Turkish National Security Council (MGK) estimated that approximately 1.3 million people of Albanian ancestry live in Turkey, and more than 500,000 recognizing their ancestry, language and culture. There are other estimates however that place the number of people in Turkey with Albanian ancestry and or background upward to 5 million.
The events of persecution against the Serbian population occurred in Ottoman Kosovo in 1878, as a consequence of the Serbian–Ottoman War (1876–78). Incoming Albanian refugees to Kosovo who were expelled by the Serb army from the Sanjak of Niš were involved in revenge attacks and hostile to the local Serb population. Ottoman Albanian troops also participated in attacks, at the behest of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
The Expulsion of Albanians 1877–1878 refers to events of forced migration of Albanian populations from areas that became incorporated into the Principality of Serbia and Principality of Montenegro in 1878. These wars, alongside the larger Russo-Ottoman War (1877–78) ended in defeat and substantial territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire which was formalised at the Congress of Berlin. This expulsion was part of the wider persecution of Muslims in the Balkans during the geopolitical and territorial decline of the Ottoman Empire.
The 1914 Greek deportations was the forcible expulsion of around 150,000 to 300,000 Ottoman Greeks from Eastern Thrace and the Aegean coast of Anatolia by the Committee of Union and Progress that culminated in May and June 1914. The deportations almost caused war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire and were an important precursor to the Armenian genocide.
Christian irregulars in the Austrian or Venetian service, and insurgent highlanders of Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania meanwhile threw off 'the Turkish yoke' by marauding, mostly against the Muslim Slavs.
Peter the Great called on Balkan subjects to revolt in 1711; Catherine the Great encouraged a Greek rebellion in 1770
According to reliable estimates, during the 16th century around one fourth of the population in Slavonia,..., were Muslims, living mostly in towns.
By 1699 130,000 Slavonian and Croatian Muslims had been driven to Ottoman Bosnia by the advancing imperialists.
...in Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Slavonia, and Lika after the Habsburg-Ottoman war of 1683–99. It was the first example in this area of cleansing the Muslim population that also "enjoyed the benediction of Catholic church".
All Muslim population left these areas or was expelled, killed or enslaved
Leopold I...not consider extending any privileges to the Muslims. They therefore fled to Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia and further southeast, fanning anti-Christian sentiments among their coreligionists.
... a period during which relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim populations of the region deteriorated sharply
The entire Slavonian Muslim population fled south into Bosnia after the Treaty of Karlovac in 1699.
Many more Muslim families that had lived in Slavonia moved to Posavina after 1699 and during the first two decades of the eighteenth
As in all other reconquered territories, the Muslims (who for example comprised two-thirds of the population in Lika) in Croatia were either converted to Catholicism or banished.
With the Turks gone, almost all the Turkish buildings on Croatian area were destroyed.
The Muslim population of Montenegro was massacred by the Serbs.
Even the precise date of the bloody affair is not certain, but most historians have accepted 1709 as the year of the assault
Muslim refugees from all territories lost by Turkey in the Balkan Wars: 1912-13 (177,352), 1914-15 (120,566)
Of the 2,315,293 Muslims who had lived in the areas taken from the Ottoman Empire in Europe (excluding Albania), 1,445,179 (62 percent) were gone. Of these, 413,922 were migrants to Turkey during and after the Balkan Wars (1912–20); and 398,849 came to Turkey between 1921 and 1926, most as part of the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange. But 812,771 Muslims from Ottoman Europe had survived as refugees. The remaining 632,408 were dead. Twenty-seven percent of the Muslim population of conquered Ottoman Europe had died.
'The members of the Commission consider that, in the part of the kazas of Yalova and Guemlek occupied by the Greek army, there is a systematic plan of destruction of Turkish villages and extinction of the Moslem population. This plan is being carried out by Greek and Armenian bands, which appear to operate under Greek instructions and sometimes even with the assistance of detachments of regular troops
The British journalist and historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, who was war correspondent for the "Manchester Guardian" on the Yalova Peninsula from April until 3 July 1921, suggests a total of 300 Muslim victims.
In total only thirty-five were reported to have been killed, wounded, beaten, or missing. This is in line with the observations of Arnold Toynbee, who declared that one to two murders were sufficient to drive away the population of a village.
To protect their flanks from harassment, Greek military authorities then encouraged irregular bands of armed men to attack and destroy Turkish populations of the region they proposed to abandon. By the time the Red Crescent vessel arrived at Yalova from Constantinople in the last week of May, fourteen out of sixteen villages in that town's immediate hinterland had been destroyed, and there were only 1500 survivors from the 7000 Moslems who had been living in these communities.
...наводно са 17 џамија...
U njemu je živjelo pretežno muslimansko stanovništvo za koje je podignuto sedam džamija, te je grad dobio orijentalno obilježje.