page_title: Western Thrace
section_title: Historical demographics
hierarchical_section_title: Western Thrace / Historical demographics
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Die Athanasiou Pantazidou Straße im Stadtzentrum (2017)
context_page_description: Western Thrace or West Thrace is a geographic and historical region of Greece, between the Nestos and Evros rivers in the northeast of the country; East Thrace, which lies east of the river Evros, forms the European part of Turkey, and the area to the north, in Bulgaria, is known as Northern Thrace.
  Inhabited since paleolithic times, it has been under the political, cultural and linguistic influence of the Greek world since the classical era; Greeks from the Aegean islands extensively colonized the region and built prosperous cities such as Abdera and Sale. Under the Byzantine Empire, Western Thrace benefited from its position close to the imperial heartland and became a center of medieval Greek commerce and culture; later, under the Ottoman Empire, a number of Muslims settled there, marking the birth of the Muslim minority of Greece.
  Topographically, Thrace alternates between mountain-enclosed basins of varying size and deeply cut river valleys. It is divided into the three regional units: Xanthi, Rhodope and Evros, which together with the Macedonian regional units of Drama, Kavala and Thasos form the Region of East Macedonia and Thrace.
context_section_description: The last censuses which asked about ethnicity were held in the transitional period before the region became part of Greece. A number of estimates and censuses during the 1912-1920 period gave the following results about the ethnic distribution of the area that would become known as Western Thrace:
  The Pomak population depending on the source was sometimes counted together with the Turks (Muslims) following the Ottoman system of classifying people according to religion, while in other occasions was specified separately. According to the Bulgarian view, they are considered "Bulgarian
  Muslims" and an integral part of the Bulgarian nation.
  By the Bulgarian census in 1919, held on the request of the Entente, of the population of Western Thrace was 219 723 of whom: Turks 35.4% (77 726 Muslims), Bulgarians 46.3% (101 766 - 81 457 Christians and 20 309 Muslims), Greeks 14.8% (32 553 Christians), Jews 1.4% (3066) Armenians 1.5% (2369), others 0,9% (1243). The area ceded to the Entente also included Karaagach and its environs, which became part of Turkey after the Treaty of Lausanne.
  Western Thrace was ceded to the Entente in December 1919, after which many Bulgarians left the region, while many Greeks moved in. The Government of the Entente (led by French general Sharpe) held its own census in 1920, according to which Western Thrace had a population of 204,700, of whom: Turks 36.5% (74,720 Muslims), Bulgarians 32.2% (65,927 = 54,079 Christians and 11,848 Muslims), Greeks 27.4% (56,114 Christians), Jews 1.5% (2985) Armenians 0.9% (1880), others 3066. At the time this census was conducted, a part of the Greek population of Ksanthi, who left massively the Ksanthi district after the Balkan wars (1913), returned.
  According to the Turkish researches the population of Western Thrace in 1923 was 191,699, of whom 129,120 (67%) were Turks/Muslims (also includes the Pomaks) and 33,910 (18%) were Greeks; the remaining 28,669 (15%) were mostly (Christian) Bulgarians, along with small numbers of Jews and Armenians (before the population exchange).
  The population of the region, according to the official census of 1928 and 1951 conducted by the local authorities, per mother tongue, was as follows:
caption: Orestiada
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