This article is about Slavic-speaking Bulgarians who migrated to Turkey. Not to be confused with Turkish-speaking Bulgarian Turks, for which, see Bulgarian Turks in Turkey.
Bulgarians in Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye'deki Bulgarlar, Bulgarian: Българи в Турция) form a minority of Turkey. They are Bulgarian expatriates in Turkey or Turkish citizens who were born there of full or partially Bulgarian descent. People of Bulgarian ancestry include a large number from the Pomak and a very small number of Orthodox of ethnic Bulgarian origin. Bulgarian Christians are officially recognized as a minority by the Turkey-Bulgaria Friendship Treaty [tr] of 18 October 1925.[1][2][3][4]
Prior to the ethnic cleansing of Thracian Bulgarians in 1913, the Christian Bulgarians had been more than the Pomaks,[5][6] afterwards Pomak refugees arrived from Greece and Bulgaria. Pomaks are also Muslim and speak a Bulgarian dialect.[7][8][9][10][11] According to Ethnologue at present 300,000 Pomaks in European Turkey speak Bulgarian as their mother tongue.[12]
It is very hard to estimate the number of Pomaks along with the Turkified Pomaks who live in Turkey, as they have blended into the Turkish society and have been often linguistically and culturally assimilated.[13] According to Milliyet and Turkish Daily News reports, the number of the Pomaks is 600,000.[13][14] The origin of the Pomaks has been debated,[15][16] but there is an academic consensus that they are descendants of native Bulgarians who converted to Islam during the Ottoman rule of the Balkans.[9][10][11][17][18]
As of 2019, there were only 500 Christian Bulgarians in Turkey.[4]
^Vemund Aarbakke, The Muslim Minority of Greek Thrace, University of Bergen, Bergen, 2000, pp.5 and 12 (pp. 27 and 34 in the pdf file). "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-04-23. Retrieved 2016-02-07.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^Olga Demetriou, "Prioritizing 'ethnicities': The uncertainty of Pomak-ness in the urban Greek Rhodoppe", in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, January 2004, pp.106-107 (pp. 12-13 in the pdf file). [1]
^The Balkans, Minorities and States in Conflict (1993), Minority Rights Publication, by Hugh Poulton, p. 111.
^Richard V. Weekes; Muslim peoples: a world ethnographic survey, Volume 1; 1984. p.612