Muslim minority of Greece

The Muslim minority of Greece is the only explicitly recognized minority in Greece. It numbers 97,605 (0.91% of the population) according to the 1991 census, and 140,000 people or 1.24% of the total population, according to the United States Department of State.

Like other parts of the southern Balkans that experienced centuries of Ottoman rule the Muslim minority of mainly Western Thrace in Northern Greece consists of several ethnic groups, some being Turkish and some Bulgarian-speaking Pomaks, with smaller numbers descended from Ottoman-era Greek converts to Islam. The precise identity of these groups is in contention with Turkey insisting that most Muslims in Western Thrace are ethnically Turkish, and Greece claiming many are Pomak and others of local origin who converted to Islam and adopted the Turkish language and identity in the Ottoman period. These arguments have territorial overtones, since the self-identity of the Muslims in Western Thrace could conceivably support territorial claims to the region by Turkey.

The Muslims of Western Thrace were exempt from the 1923 Population exchange between Greece and Turkey (when all of the 1.5 million surviving Anatolian Greeks or Pontic Greeks and Caucasus Greeks were required to leave Turkey, and the 356,000 Muslims outside of Thrace were required to leave Greece, including the Muslim Greek Vallahades of western Greek Macedonia. Consequently, most of the Muslim minority in Greece resides in the Greek region of Thrace, where they make up 28.88% of the population. Muslims form the majority in the Rhodope regional unit (51.77%) and sizable percentages in the Xanthi (41.19%) and Evros regional units (4.65%).

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