Western Thracian Muslims in Athens

Abstract

The minority population of Western Thrace has usually been examined only in its region of origin and through the lens of a scholarship that produces a set of terminologies, demographic data, concrete and measurable identities created and controlled by the Greek and Turkish states. In this article, however, I examine Western Thracian Muslim presence in Athens. My goal is to sense and follow the movement of the migrants' social life in Athens from the late 1970s to the present day in order to grasp the flowing, fleeting, or submerged forces that produce and regenerate a minority consciousness in an urban context. After examining terminological preferences, state fears and policies, migrants' settlement patterns and living conditions, social life in coffee houses, the establishment of migrants' associations, I ask : what changes when Western Thracian Muslims settle in the Greek capital ?