page_title: Yörüks
section_title: Kayılar Yörüks
hierarchical_section_title: Yörüks / Balkans / Kayılar Yörüks
caption_attribution_description: English: Anthropological essay on male Yörük adults (Felix von Luschan, 1889) Felix von Luschan 1889, in: Eugen Petersen &amp; Felix von Luschan (Eds.): "Reisen in Lykien Milyas und Kibyratis", Carl Gerold's Sohn, Wien 1889, Tafeln XXXV-XXXVIII
context_page_description: The Yörüks, also Yuruks or Yorouks, are a Turkish ethnic subgroup of Oghuz descent, some of whom are nomadic, primarily inhabiting the mountains of Anatolia, and partly in the Balkan peninsula. On the Balkans Yörüks are distributed over a wide area from southern Serbia, parts of Bulgaria, north to Larissa in Thessaly and southern Thrace. Their name derives from the Turkish verb yürü-, which means "to walk", with the word yörük or yürük designating "those who walk on the hindlegs, walkers". Yörüks lived within the Yörük Sanjak which was not a territorial unit like other sanjaks but a separate organisational unit of the Ottoman Empire.
  According to some, those tribes residing in the east of the Kızılırmak river are called Turkmen and those in the west Yörük. Both terms were used together in Ottoman sources for Dulkadirli Turkmens living in Maraş and its surroundings. The ethnohistorical terms Turcoman and Turkmen are used synonymously in literature to designate Yörük ancestry. Today they live mostly in houses in the valleys and plains and have a general tendency toward fair hair and a fair complexion, and blue or greyish-blue eyes.
context_section_description: The Kailar Turks formerly inhabited parts of Thessaly and Macedonia (especially near the town of Kozani and modern Ptolemaida). Before 1360, large numbers of nomad shepherds, or Yörüks, from the district of Konya, in Asia Minor, had settled in the country. Further immigration from this region took place from time to time up to the middle of the 18th century. After the establishment of the feudal system in 1397 many of the Seljuk noble families came over from Asia Minor; some of the beys or Muslim landowners in southern Macedonia before the Balkan Wars may have been their descendants.
caption: Anthropological essay on male Yörük adults (Felix von Luschan, 1889)
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