The guardian sent me here

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For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

I haven't looked at the article but taking this quote on its own...

Talking of 'Greece' before the war of independence is strictly speaking anachronistic. The Greek nation and national identity came into existence as a result of nationalism. The boundaries of the Greek state changed radically over its first century of existence. Its current boundaries are a historical accident. If Greek military adventures at the end of WW1 had been a little more successful 'Greece' would now include Thrace, Constantinople and the Aegean coast of Anatolia, along maybe with Cyprus and the Black Sea coast around Trabzon, and the borders would seem just as natural as the current borders do. What did exist throughout the Ottoman period was an identity linked to the Orthodox Church that was mainly, but never completely, Greek speaking. In Anatolia over time there was a lot conversion to Islam, which mostly also led to the adoption of the Turkish language as well. This wasn't always the case though and there are still villages in the mountains around Trabzon where the people are Muslims speaking a dialect of Pontic Greek. Elsewhere in central Anatolia there were Orthodox communities that became Turkish speaking and wrote Turkish using the Greek alphabet. In what is now mainland Greece there seems to have been much less conversion, though there were some groups of Greek Muslims. The area east of Thessaloniki may be an exception to this and the largely Muslim Turkish speaking population there probably originated in part from Greek speaking converts. The most obvious and visible example of conversion to Islam within the modern boundaries of Greece was in Crete, where the Muslims were almost entirely Greek speaking and in the early 19th century probably accounted for nearly half the population. This changed as a result of a conscious policy of ethnic cleansing by the Greek state. Hundreds of thousands of people in Turkey, Syria and elsewhere are the descendants of Muslim refugees from Crete. Some of them, especially in Syria, still speak Greek. All of them are the descendants of Greek speaking converts from Orthodox Christianity.

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Topic: The guardian sent me here

zeca

Reply #60 - November 02, 2015, 11:45 AM

nbhb

Reply #61 - November 02, 2015, 01:10 PM

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