Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Bulgarian Turks
Summary
Bulgarian Turks (bylgarski turci; Bulgaristan Türkleri) are ethnic Turks from Bulgaria. According to the 2021 census, there were 508,375 Bulgarians of Turkish descent, roughly 8.4% of the population, making them the country's largest ethnic minority. Bulgarian Turks also comprise the largest single population of Turks in the Balkans. They primarily live in the southern province of Kardzhali and the northeastern provinces of Shumen, Silistra, Razgrad and Targovishte. There is also a diaspora outside Bulgaria in countries such as Turkey, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Romania, the most significant of which are the Bulgarian Turks in Turkey.
Bulgarian Turks are the descendants of Turkish settlers who entered the region after the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, as well as Bulgarian converts to Islam who became Turkified during the centuries of Ottoman rule. However, it has also been suggested that some Turks living today in Bulgaria may be direct ethnic descendants of earlier medieval Pecheneg, Oghuz, and Cuman Turkic tribes. According to local tradition, following a resettlement policy Karamanid Turks (mainly from the Konya Vilayet, Nevşehir Vilayet and Niğde Vilayet of the Karaman Province) were settled mainly in the Kardzhali area by the sultans Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim and Mahmud II. The Turkish community became an ethnic minority when the Principality of Bulgaria was established after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. This community is of Turkish ethnic consciousness and differs from the majority Bulgarian ethnicity and the rest of the Bulgarian nation by its own language, religion, culture, customs, and traditions.
Genetic studies on Turkish people
DNA research investigating the three largest population groups in Bulgaria: Bulgarians, Turks and Roma confirms with Y-chromosomal analysis on STR that there are significant differences between the three ethnic groups.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.