page_title: Bulgarian Turks
section_title: Summary
hierarchical_section_title: Bulgarian Turks / Summary
caption_attribution_description: English: Distribution of Turks in Bulgaria by province, as of 2011.
context_page_description: Bulgarian Turks are a Turkish ethnic group from Bulgaria. In 2011, there were 588,318 Bulgarians of Turkish descent, roughly 8.8% of the population, making them the country's largest ethnic minority. 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, Netherlands, Sweden, 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, Oğuz, and Cuman Turkic tribes. According to local tradition, following a resettlement policy Karamanid Turks were settled mainly in the Kardzhali area by the sultans Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim and Mahmud II.
context_section_description: Turks settled in the territory of modern Bulgaria during and after the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Being the dominant group in the Ottoman Empire for the next five centuries, they played an important part in the economic and cultural life of the land. Waves of impoverished Turks settled fertile lands, while Bulgarian families left their strategic settlements and resettled in more remote places. According to the historian Halil Inalcik, the Ottomans ensured significant Turkish presence in forward urban outposts such as Nikopol, Kyustendil, Silistra, Trikala, Skopje and Vidin and their vicinity. Ottoman Muslims constituted the majority in and around strategic routes primarily in the southern Balkans leading from Thrace towards Macedonia and the Adriatic and again from the Maritsa and Tundzha valleys towards the Danube region. According to Aubaret, the French Consul in Ruse in 1876 in the Danube Vilayet (which then included the territory of the post-1878 Bulgarian principality and Northern Dobruja) alone there were 1,120,000 Muslims, of whom 774,000 (33%) were Turks and 1,233,500 non-Muslims of whom 1,150,000 were Bulgarian. The Ottoman officer Stanislas Saint Clair in 1876 based on Ottoman teskere estimated roughly the same proportions and that Turkish males in the Danube Vilayet represent 36% of the male population. Between 1876 and 1878, through emigration, massacres, epidemics and hunger a large portion of the Turkish population vanished. The flow of Turks to Anatolia continued in a steady pattern depending on the policies of the ruling regimes until 1925 after which immigration was regulated. During the 20th century Bulgaria also practiced forced deportations and expulsions, which also targeted the Muslim Pomak population.
  The biggest wave of Turkish emigration occurred in 1989, when 360,000 left Bulgaria as a result of the communist Todor Zhivkov regime's assimilation campaign, but around 150,000 returned between 1989 and 1990. That program, which began in 1984, forced all Turks and other Muslims in Bulgaria to adopt Christian names and renounce all Muslim customs. The motivation of the 1984 assimilation campaign was unclear; however, many experts believed that the disproportion between the birth rates of the Turks and the Bulgarians was a major factor. The official government claim was that the Turks in Bulgaria were really Bulgarians who were Turkified, and that they voluntarily chose to change their Turkish/Muslim names to Bulgarian/Slavic ones. During this period the Bulgarian authorities denied all reports of ethnic repression and that ethnic Turks existed in the country. During the name-changing phase of the campaign, Turkish towns and villages were surrounded by army units. Citizens were issued new identity cards with Bulgarian names. Failure to present a new card meant forfeiture of salary, pension payments, and bank withdrawals. Birth or marriage certificates would be issued only in Bulgarian names. Traditional Turkish costumes were banned; homes were searched and all signs of Turkish identity removed. Mosques were closed or demolished. Turkish names on gravestones were replaced with Bulgarian names. According to estimates reported by the Federal Research Division of the US Library of Congress, 500 to 1,500 people were killed when they resisted assimilation measures, and thousands of others were sent to labor camps or were forcibly resettled.
  The fall of communism in Bulgaria led to a reversal of the state's policy towards its citizens of Turkish descent. After the fall of Zhivkov in 1989, the National Assembly of Bulgaria passed laws to restore the cultural rights of the Turkish population. In 1991 a new law gave anyone affected by the name-changing campaign three years to officially restore original names and the names of children born after the name change. In January 1991, Turkish-language lessons were reintroduced as a non-compulsory subject for four hours per week if requested. According to the 2011 census in Bulgaria, there are 588,318 persons from the Tur
caption: Percentage of Turkish population by provinces to total population according to the 2011 census[1]
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