page_title: Pomaks
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Pomaks / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Ethnographic map of European Turkey from 1877. Author Carl Sax, Austro-Hungarian diplomat in Adrianople.
context_page_description: Pomaks is a term used for Bulgarian speaking Muslims inhabiting Bulgaria, northeastern Greece and mainly northwestern Turkey. The c. 220,000 strong ethno-confessional minority in Bulgaria is known officially as Bulgarian Muslims. The term has also been used as a wider designation, including also the Slavic Muslim populations of North Macedonia and Albania.
  They speak various Bulgarian dialects and those spoken in Greece and Turkey are referred to there as the Pomak language. The community in Greece is commonly fluent in Greek, and in Turkey, Turkish, while the communities in these two countries, especially in Turkey, are increasingly adopting Turkish as their first language as a result of education and family links with the Turkish people.
  They are not officially recognized as one people with the ethnonym of Pomaks. The term is widely used colloquially for Eastern South Slavic Muslims, considered derogatory. However, in Greece and Turkey the practice for declaring the ethnic group at census has been abolished for decades. Different members of the group today declare a variety of ethnic identities: Bulgarian, Pomak, Muslim, Turkish and other.
context_section_description: Pomaks are today usually considered descendants of Orthodox Bulgarians, Greeks and Paulicians who converted to Islam during the Ottoman rule of the Balkans. They started to become Muslim gradually, from the Ottoman occupation (early 15th century) to the end of the 18th century. Subsequently, this people became part of the Muslim community of the millet system. At that time people were bound to their millets by their religious affiliations (or their confessional communities), rather than their ethnic origins, according to the millet concept.
  A monk Pachomios Roussanos (1508–1553), who visited the mountain area of Xanthi, mentioned that around 1550 only 6 or 9 villages had turned to Islam.  Furthermore the documents show that not only Islam has been spread in the area at that time, but that the Pomaks participated in Ottoman military operations voluntarily as is the case with the village of Shahin (Echinos).
  In North Central Bulgaria (the regions of Lovech, Teteven, Lukovit, Byala Slatina) the Ottoman authorities requested in 1689, after the Chiprovtsi Uprising, for military reasons Bulgarian Paulicians (Christian heretics) to convert to one of the officially recognized religions in the Ottoman Empire. One part of them converted to the East Orthodoxy (some of them to Catholicism) and became Bulgarian-Christians, while the other part converted to Islam and began to be called Pomaks. So, in North Central Bulgaria Pomaks became those of Bulgarian Christian heretics, for which it was unacceptable or impossible to convert to the East Orthodoxy because of dogmatic, economic, family or other reasons.
  The mass turn to Islam in the Central Rhodope Mountains happened between the 16th and the 17th century. According to the Codes of Bishop of Philippoupolis and the Czech historian and slavist Konstantin Josef Jireček in the middle of the 17th century, some Bulgarian provosts agreed to become Muslim en masse. They visited the Ottoman local administrator to announce their decision, but he sent them to the Greek bishop of Philippoupolis Gabriel (1636–1672). The bishop couldn't change their mind. According to the verbal tradition of the Greeks of Philippoupolis, a large ceremony of mass circumcision took place in front of the old mosque of the city, near the Government House. After that, the villagers became Muslim, too. According to the verbal tradition of the Bulgarians, Grand Vizier Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (1656–1661) threatened the Bulgarians of Chepino Valley that he would execute them if they didn't turn to Islam. In 1656, Ottoman military troops entered the Chepino valley and arrested the local Bulgarian provosts, in order to transfer them in the local Ottoman administrator. There, they converted to Islam.  Grand Vizier Mehmed Köprülü, after the mass Islamization, destroyed 218 churches and 336 chapels in these areas. A lot of Bulgarians preferred to die instead of becoming Muslim. According to recent investigations the theory of forced conversion to Islam, supported by some scientists, has no solid grounds with all or most evidence being faked or misinterpreted. At the same time, the sincerity of the convert is a subject to suspicion and interrogation. Some authors for example, explain the mass conversions that occurred in the 17th century with the tenfold increase of the Jizya tax. Muslim communities prospered under the Ottoman Empire, as the Sultan was also the Caliph. Ottoman law did not recognize such notions as ethnicity or citizenship; thus, a Muslim of any ethnic background enjoyed precisely the same rights and privileges.
  Meanwhile, the perception of the millet concept was altered during the 19th century and rise of nationalism within the Ottoman Empire begun. After the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), Pomaks in the Vacha valley, apprehensive of retribution for their role in the bloody suppression of the April Uprising two years earlier, rebelled against Eastern Rumelia and established an autonomous state, called Republic of Tamrash. In 1886 the Ottoman government accepted the Bulgarian rule over Eastern Rumelia and that was th
caption: Ethnographic map of European Turkey from the late 19th century, showing the regions largely populated by Pomaks in brown.
exif: {}