Millets in Nation-States: The Case of Greek and Bulgarian Muslims, 1912–1923

Abstract

It is estimated that, in 1913, less than 500,000 Muslims lived in the regions ruled by Greece and around 800,000 Muslims in those areas which were under the authority of the Bulgarian state. In the aftermath of the 1923 obligatory Greco-Turkish population exchange the number of Muslims in Greece reduced to approximately 200,000, of which around 180,000 lived in the region of Western Thrace and 20–25,000 Albanian-speaking Muslims, known as Çams, in Epirus and Greek South-West Macedonia. In the same period, the number of Muslims in Bulgaria was between 800,000 and one million people. Meanwhile, during the two Balkan and the First World Wars a hardly definable number of Muslims lost their lives due to starvation, disease, massacres and physical destruction caused by the military and paramilitary troops of the two Balkan states, as well as due to voluntary and forced migration to areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire.