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TheMuhacirs are estimated to be millions ofOttomanMuslim citizens and their descendants born after the onset of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Muhacirs primarily consist ofTurks, but alsoAlbanians,Bosniaks,Chechens,[1]Circassians,Crimean Tatars,Pomaks,Macedonian Muslims,Greek Muslims,Serb Muslims,[2]Georgian Muslims,[3]Ossetian Muslims[4] andMuslim Roma[5] They immigrated to modern-dayTurkey from the late 18th century until the end of the 20th century,[clarification needed] mainly to escape ongoingpersecution of Ottoman Muslims by Christians in territories formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Up to a third of the modern-day population of Turkey may have ancestry from these Turkish and other Muslim migrants.[6]
Approximately 5-7 million Muslim migrants from the Balkans (fromBulgaria, 1.15-1.5 million;Greece, 1.2 million;Romania, 400,000;Yugoslavia, 800,000;Russia, 500,000; theCaucasus, 900,000, of whom two-thirds remained, the rest going toSyria,Jordan andCyprus); and Syria, 500,000, mostly as a result of the Syrian Civil War) arrived inOttomanAnatolia and modern Turkey from 1783 to 2016. Of these, 4 million came by 1924; 1.3 million, post-1934 to 1945; and more than 1.2 million, before the outbreak of theSyrian Civil War in 2011.
The influx of Muhacir migration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was caused by the loss of almost all Ottoman territory in Europe during theBalkan War of 1912-13 andWorld War I.[7] These refugees viewed the Ottoman Empire, and subsequently theRepublic of Turkey, as a protective "motherland".[8] Many Muhacirs escaped to Anatolia as a result of the widespreadpersecution of Ottoman Muslims by Christians during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.
Thereafter, with the establishment of theRepublic of Turkey in 1923, a large influx ofTurks, as well as other Muslims, from theBalkans, theBlack Sea, theCaucasus, theAegean islands,Cyprus, theSanjak of Alexandretta (İskenderun), theMiddle East, and theSoviet Union continued to arrive in the region, mostly settling in urban north-western Anatolia.[9][10] During theCircassian genocide, 800,000–1,500,000 Muslim Circassians[11] were systematicallymass-murdered,ethnically cleansed, andexpelled fromCircassia in the aftermath of theRusso-Circassian War (1763–1864).[12][13][clarification needed] In 1923, more than half a million ethnic Muslims of various nationalities arrived from Greece as part of thepopulation exchange between Greece and Turkey (an exchange based not on ethnicity but religious affiliation).[citation needed] After 1925, Turkey continued to accept Turkic-speaking Muslims as immigrants and did not discourage the immigration of members of non-Turkic minorities. More than 90 percent of all immigrants arrived from Balkan countries. From 1934 to 1945, 229,870 refugees and immigrants came to Turkey.[14]
From the 1930s to 2016, migration added two million Muslims in Turkey. The majority of these wereBalkan Turks who faced harassment and discrimination.[9] New waves of Turks and other Muslims expelled fromBulgaria andYugoslavia between 1951 and 1953 were followed to Turkey by another exodus from Bulgaria in 1983–89, bringing the total immigration figures to nearly 10 million people.[7]
More recently,Meskhetian Turks have immigrated to Turkey from formerSoviet Union states (particularly fromUkraine after theannexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014); and manyIraqi Turkmen andSyrian Turkmen have taken refuge in Turkey due to the recentIraq War (2003–2011) andSyrian Civil War (2011–2024). Since the Syrian Civil War,more than 3.7 million Syrians migrated to Turkey, but the classification of Syrian refugees as Muhacirs has been described as controversial and politically charged.[15][16]
Initially, the first wave of Muhacir migration occurred in 1830, when manyAlgerian Turks were forced to leave the region following the French conquest ofAlgeria; approximately 10,000 Turks were relocated toİzmir, inTurkey, whilst many others also migrated toPalestine,Syria,Arabia, andEgypt.[17]
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| Years | Number |
|---|---|
| 1878-1912 | 350,000 |
| 1923-33 | 101,507 |
| 1934-39 | 97,181 |
| 1940-49 | 21,353 |
| 1950-51 | 154,198 |
| 1952-68 | 24 |
| 1969-78 | 114,356 |
| 1979-88 | 0 |
| 1989-92 | 321,800 |
| Total | 1,160,614 |
The first wave of Muhacir emigration from Bulgaria occurred during theRusso-Turkish War (1828–1829), when around 30,000Bulgarian Turks arrived inTurkey.[19] The second wave of about 750,000 emigrants left Bulgaria during theRusso-Turkish War of 1877-78, but approximately one-fourth of them died on the way.[19] More than 200,000 of the rest remained inside the present borders of Turkey, whilst the others were sent to other parts of theOttoman Empire.[19] The aftermath of the war led to major demographic restructuring of Bulgaria's ethnic and religious make-up.[20]
As a result of these migrations, the percentage of Turks in Bulgaria was reduced from more than one-third of the population immediately after the Russo-Turkish War to 14.2% in 1900.[21] Substantial numbers of Turks continued to immigrate toTurkey during and following theBalkan Wars and theFirst World War, in accordance with compulsory exchange of population agreements betweenGreece, Bulgaria, and Turkey. By 1934 the Turkish community had been reduced to 9.7% of Bulgaria's total population and continued to fall during the subsequent decades.[20]
Communist rule after theSecond World War ended most emigration from Bulgaria, but furtherbilateral agreements were negotiated in the early 1950s and late 1960s to regulate the outflow of Bulgarian Turks.[22] The heavy taxation, nationalisation of private minority schools, and measures against theTurkish culture in the name of the modernisation of Bulgaria, built up great pressure for the Turkish minority to emigrate; and, when exit restrictions were relaxedin 1950, many ethnic Turks applied to leave. In August 1950, the Bulgarian government announced that 250,000 ethnic Turks had made applications to immigrate and pressured Turkey to accept them within three months.[22] However, the Turkish authorities declared that the country could not accept these numbers in such a short time and closed its borders over the following year.
In what was tantamount to an expulsion, pressure for ethnic Turks to leave continued and by late 1951 some 155,000 Turks left Bulgaria. Most had abandoned their property or sold it well below its value, resettling successfully primarily in theMarmara andAegean regions, helped by the distribution of land and the provision of housing.[22][23] In 1968 another agreement was reached between the two countries, which allowed the departure of relatives of those who had left up to 1951 to unite with their divided families; and another 115,000 people left Bulgaria for Turkey between 1968 and 1978.[22][24]
The latest wave of Turkish emigration began with an exodus in 1989, known as the "big excursion", when the Bulgarian Turks fled to Turkey in order to escape acampaign of forced assimilation.[24][20] This marked a dramatic culmination of years of tension in the Turkish community, which began with the Bulgarian government's assimilation campaign to ban the wearing of traditional Turkish dress and speakingTurkish in public places, then intensified in the winter of 1985 to make ethnic Turks change their names to Bulgarian Slavic ones[24]
By May 1989, the Bulgarian authorities began to expel the Turks; when the Turkish government's efforts to negotiate with Bulgaria for an orderly migration failed, Turkey opened its borders to Bulgaria on 2 June 1989. However, on 21 August of that year, Turkey reintroduced immigration visa requirements for Bulgarian Turks. It was estimated that about 360,000 ethnic Turks had left for Turkey, though more than one-third subsequently returned to Bulgaria once the ban on Turkish names was revoked in December 1989.[24]
Nonetheless, once the Bulgarian communist regime fell and Bulgarian citizens were allowed freedom of travel again, some 218,000 Bulgarians left the country for Turkey. The subsequent emigration wave was prompted by continuously deteriorating economic conditions; furthermore, the first democratic elections in 1990 won by the renamed communist party resulted in the departure of 88,000 people, once again mostly Bulgarian Turks, from the country.[25] By 1992, immigration to Turkey resumed at a greater rate—this time, however, pushed by economic reasons because of Bulgaria's economic decline in ethnically mixed regions.[26] Bulgarian Turks were left without state subsidies or other forms of state assistance and experienced an especially deep recession.[26] According to the 1992 census, some 344,849 Bulgarians of Turkish origin had migrated to Turkey between 1989 and 1992, resulting in significant demographic decline in southern Bulgaria.[26]
The events of theCircassian Genocide—namely, theethnic cleansing, killing,forced migration, andexpulsion of the majority of theCircassians from the Caucasus[27]—resulted in the deaths of approximately at least 600,000 Caucasian natives[28] and up to 1,500,000[29] deaths, and the successful migration of the remaining of 900,000–1,500,000Caucasians who immigrated to theOttoman Empire due to intermittent Russian attacks from 1768 to 1917. In the 1860s and 1870s, the Ottoman government settled Circassians in territories of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, Greece, Cyprus, and North Macedonia.[30] Today,[clarification needed] there are up to 7,000,000[31] people of Circassian descent living inTurkey and presumably more with Circassian descent because it's been hard to differentiate among ethnic groups in Turkey.[clarification needed]
From 1771 until the beginning of the 19th century, approximately 500,000Crimean Tatars arrived inAnatolia.[32]
Russian officials usually posited a shared religious identity between Turks andTatars as the primary driving force behind the Tatar migrations. They reasoned that Muslim Tatars would not want to live inOrthodox Russia which had annexed Crimea before the 1792Treaty of Jassy. With this treaty began an exodus ofNogai Tatars to the Ottoman Empire.[33]
Prior to the annexation, the Tatar nobility (mizra) could not make the peasants aserf class, which had allowed the Tatar peasants relative freedom compared to other parts ofEastern Europe, and they were permitted use of all "wild and untilled" lands for cultivation. Under the "wild lands" rules,Crimea had expanded its agricultural lands as farmers cultivated previously untilled lands. Many aspects of land ownership and the relationship between themizra and peasants was government were governed underIslamic law. After the annexation, many of the communal lands of the Crimean Tatars were confiscated by Russians,[34] and the migrations to the Ottoman Empire began when their hopes of Ottoman victory were dashed at the close of theRusso-Turkish War of 1787-1792.[33]
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The first wave of immigration from Cyprus to Turkey occurred in 1878 when theOttomans were obliged to lease the island toGreat Britain, at which time 15,000Turkish Cypriots moved to Anatolia.[19] The flow of Turkish Cypriot immigration toTurkey continued in the aftermath of theFirst World War, gaining its greatest velocity in the mid-1920s and continuing at fluctuating speeds during the Second World War.[35]Turkish Cypriot migration has continued since theCyprus conflict.
Economic motives played an important part in the Turkish Cypriot migration wave, as conditions for the poor in Cyprus were especially harsh during the 1920s. Enthusiasm to emigrate to Turkey was inflated by the euphoria that greeted the birth of the newly established Republic of Turkey and later of promises of assistance to Turks who immigrated. A decision taken by the Turkish Government at the end of 1925, for instance, noted that theTurks of Cyprus had, according to theTreaty of Lausanne, the right to emigrate to the republic; and therefore, families that so immigrated would be given a house and sufficient land.[35] The precise number of those who emigrated to Turkey remains unknown.[36] The Turkish press reported in mid-1927 that of those who had opted for Turkish nationality, 5,000–6,000 Turkish Cypriots had already settled in Turkey. However, many Turkish Cypriots had already emigrated even before the rights accorded to them under theTreaty of Lausanne had come into force.[37]
In an attempt by St. John-Jones to accurately estimate the true demographic impact of Turkish Cypriot immigration to Turkey between 1881 and 1931, he supposed that:
"[I]f the Turkish-Cypriot community had, like the Greek-Cypriots, increased by 101 per cent between 1881 and 1931, it would have totalled 91,300 in 1931 – 27,000 more than the number enumerated. Is it possible that so many Turkish-Cypriots emigrated in the fifty-year period? Taken together, the considerations just mentioned suggest that it probably was. From a base of 45,000 in 1881, emigration of anything like 27,000 persons seems huge, but after subtracting the known 5,000 of the 1920s, the balance represents an average annual outflow of some 500 – not enough, probably, to concern the community’s leaders, evoke official comment, or be documented in any way which survives today".[38]
According to Ali Suat Bilge, taking into consideration the mass migrations of 1878, the First World War, the 1920s early Turkish Republican era, and the Second World War, overall, a total of approximately 100,000 Turkish Cypriots had left the island for Turkey between 1878 and 1945.[39] By 31 August 31 1955, a statement by Turkey's Minister of State and Acting Foreign Minister,Fatin Rüştü Zorlu, at the London Conference on Cyprus, said that:
Consequently, today [1955] as well, when we take into account the state of the population in Cyprus, it is not sufficient to say, for instance, that 100,000 Turks live there. One should rather say that 100,000 out of 24,000,000 Turks live there and that 300,000 Turkish Cypriots live in various parts of Turkey.[40]
By 2001 the TRNC Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated that 500,000 Turkish Cypriots were living in Turkey.[41]
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The immigration of the Turks from Greece to Turkey started in the early 1820s upon the establishment of an independent Greece in 1829. By the end of the First World War, approximately 800,000 Turks had immigrated to Turkey from Greece.[19] Then, in accordance with the 1923Treaty of Lausanne, under the 1923Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations,Greece andTurkey agreed to the compulsoryexchange of ethnic populations. The termMübadil was used to refer specifically to this migration.
Between 350,000 and 500,000MuslimTurks emigrated from Greece to Turkey, and about 1.3 millionOrthodox ChristianGreeks from Turkey moved to Greece.[42] "Greek" and "Turkish" was defined by religion rather than linguistically or culturally.[43] According to Article 1 of the Convention: "…There shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory. These persons shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece without the authorization of the Turkish government or of the Greek government".[44]
An article published inThe Times on December 5, 1923, stated that:
"…This transfer of populations is made especially difficult by the fact that few if any of the Turks in Greece desire to leave and most of them will resort to every possible expedient to avoid being sent away. A thousand Turks who voluntarily emigrated fromCrete toSmyrna have sent several deputations to the Greek government asking to be allowed to return. Groups of Turks from all parts of Greece have submitted petitions for exemption. A few weeks ago, a group ofTurks from Crete came toAthens with a request that they bebaptized into theGreek church and thus be entitled to consideration as Greeks. The government however declined to permit this evasion."[45]
The only exclusions from the forced transfer were the Christians living inConstantinople (Istanbul) and theWestern Thrace Turks.[43] The remaining Turks living in Greece have since continuously immigrated toTurkey, a process which has been facilitated by Article 19 of theGreek Nationality Law that the Greek state has used to deny re-entry of Turks who leave the country, even for temporary periods, and deprived them of their citizenship.[46] Since 1923, between 300,000 and 400,000 Turks of Western Thrace left the region, most of them went toTurkey.[47]
Immigration from Romania to Anatolia dates back to the early 1800s when the Russian armies made advances into the region. During theOttoman period, the greatest waves of immigration took place in 1826 when approximately 200,000 people arrived inTurkey and then in 1878–1880 with 90,000 arrivals.[19] Following the Republican period, an agreement made, on September 4, 1936, between Romania and Turkey allowed 70,000Romanian Turks to leave theDobruja region for Turkey.[48] By the 1960s, inhabitants living in the Turkishexclave ofAda Kaleh were forced to leave the island when it was destroyed in order to build theIron Gate I Hydroelectric Power Station, which caused the extinction of the local community through the migration of all individuals to different parts of Romania and Turkey.[49]
In1862 more than 10,000 Muslims, including Turks, were expelled from Serbia toOttoman Bulgaria andOttoman Bosnia.[50]
In December 2016 the Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Ümit Yalçın stated that Turkey opened its borders to 500,000Syrian Turkmen refugees fleeing theSyrian Civil War.[51]
Immigration from Yugoslavia started in the 1800s as a consequence of theSerb revolution. Approximately 150,000 Muslims immigrated to Anatolia in 1826, and then, in 1867, a similar number of Muslims moved to Anatolia.[19] In 1862–67, Muslim exiles from thePrincipality of Serbia settled in theBosnia Vilayet.[52] Upon the proclamation of theRepublic of Turkey, 350,000 migrants arrived in Turkey between 1923 and 1930.[19] An additional 160,000 people immigrated to Turkey after the establishment ofCommunist Yugoslavia from 1946 to 1961. Since 1961, immigrants from that Yugoslavia amounted to 50,000 people.[19]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)Today, the largest communities of Circassians, about 5–7 million, live in Turkey, and about 200,000 Circassians live in the Middle Eastern countries (Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Israel). The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a new wave of migration from diaspora countries to Europe and the United States. It is estimated that there are now more than 100,000 Circassian living in the European Union countries. The community in Kosovo expatriated to Adygea after the war in 1998.
