Western Thrace

Flag of revolutionaries of Western Thrace and Samothrace during the Greek War of Independence

The approximate area of Western Thrace is 8,578 km² with a population of 371,208 according to the 2011 census.[1] It's estimated that two-thirds (67%) of the population are Orthodox Christian Greeks, while about a third (33%) are Muslims who are an officially recognised minority of Greece. Of these, about a quarter are of Turkish origin, while another quarter are Pomaks who mainly inhabit the mountainous parts of the region. The rest are Muslim Greeks or Romani. The Romani of Thrace are also mainly Muslim, unlike their ethnic kin in other parts of the country who generally profess the Orthodox faith of the Greek majority.

Thrace is bordered by Bulgaria to the north, Turkey to the east, the Aegean Sea (Greece) to the south and the Greek region of Macedonia to the west. Alexandroupolis is the largest city, with a municipal population of 72,959 according to the 2011 census.[1] Below is a table of the five largest Thracian cities:[1]

Ruins of the ancient city of Abdera

The ancient theatre of Maroneia

Roman mosaics in Plotinopolis, modern Didymoteicho

After the Roman conquest, Western Thrace further belonged to the Roman province of Thracia founded in 46 AD. At the beginning of the 2nd AD century Roman emperor Trajan founded here, as a part of the provincial policy, two cities of Greek type (i.e. city-states), Traianoupolis and Plotinopolis. From this region passed the famous Via Egnatia, which ensured the communication between East and West, while its ramifications were connecting the Aegean world with Thracian hinterland (i.e. upper and middle valley of Evros river). From the coast also passed the sea route Troad–Macedonia, which the Apostle Paul had used in his journeys in Greece. During the great crisis of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century AD, Western Thrace suffered from the frequent incursions of the barbarians until the reign of Diocletian, when it managed to prosper again thanks to its administrative reforms.[4]

The region had been under the rule of the Byzantine Empire from the time of the division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western empires in the early fourth century AD. The Ottoman Empire conquered most of the region in the 14th century and ruled it until the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. During Ottoman rule, Thrace had a mixed population of Turks and Bulgarians, with a strong Greek element in the cities and the Aegean Sea littoral. A smaller number of Pomaks, Jews, Armenians and Romani also lived in the region. At 1821, several parts of Western Thrace, such as Lavara, Maroneia, and Samothraki rebelled and participated in the Greek War of Independence.

Greek administration stamp in Western Thrace, 1920

During the First Balkan War, the Balkan League (Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro) fought against the Ottoman Empire and annexed most of its European territory, including Thrace. Western Thrace was occupied by Bulgarian troops who defeated the Ottoman army. On November 15, 1912, on the right bank of the river Maritza, Macedonian-Adrianopolitan Volunteer Corps captured the Turkish corps of Yaver Paha, which defended Eastern Rhodopes and Western Thrace from invading Bulgarians.

View of the old town of Xanthi

The victors quickly fell into dispute on how to divide the newly conquered lands, resulting in the Second Balkan War. In August 1913, Bulgaria was defeated, but kept Western Thrace under the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest.

In the following years, the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire), with which Bulgaria had sided, lost World War I, and as a result, Bulgaria had to surrender Western Thrace under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Neuilly.[5] Western Thrace was under temporary management of the Entente led by French General Charles Antoine Charpy. In late April 1920, as per the San Remo conference with gathered the leaders of the main allies of the Entente powers (except the US), Western Thrace was given to Greece.

Throughout the Balkan Wars and World War I, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey each forced respective minority populations in the Thrace region out of areas they controlled. A large population of Greeks in Eastern Thrace, and Black Sea coastal and southern Bulgaria, was expelled south and west into Greek-controlled Thrace. Concurrently, a large population of Bulgarians was forced from the region into Bulgaria by Greek and Turkish actions. Turkish populations in the area were also targeted by Bulgarian and Greek forces and pushed eastward. As part of the Treaty of Neuilly and subsequent agreements, the status of the expelled populations was legitimized. This was followed by a further population exchange which radically changed the demographics of the region toward increased ethnic homogenization within the territories each respective country was ultimately awarded.

This was followed by the large-scale Greek-Turkish population exchanges of 1923 (Treaty of Lausanne), which finalized the reversal of Western and Eastern Thrace region's pre-Balkan War demography. The treaty granted the status of a minority to the Muslims in Western Thrace, in exchange for a similar status for the ethnic Greek minority in Istanbul and the Aegean islands of Imbros and Tenedos.

After the German invasion (April 1941), the area was occupied by Bulgarian troops, as part of the triple Axis occupation of Greece, during World War II. During this period (1941-1944) the demographic distribution was further changed, with the arrest of the region's approximately 4,500 Jews by the Bulgarian police and their deportation to death camps administered by Germany. None of them survived.[6]

Old silk factory in Soufli

The economy of Thrace in recent years has become less dependent on agriculture. A number of Greek-owned high-tech telecommunications companies have settled in the area. The Egnatia Odos motorway which passes through Thrace has contributed to the further development of the region. Tourism is slowly becoming more and more important as the Aegean coast has a number of beaches, and there is also the potential for winter tourism activities in the Rhodopi mountains, the natural border with Bulgaria, which are covered by dense forest.

Kimisis Tis Theotokou, Greek Orthodox Church, Komotini, West Thrace

Eski Mosque in Komotini

Holocaust Memorial

It's estimated that two-thirds (67%) of the population are Orthodox Christian Greeks while about a third (33%) are part of the recognized Muslim minority of Greece.[1]

Of the Muslim minority:[7]

• Turkish: ~35%
• Pomaks: ~35%
• Roma people: ~15%
• ethnic Greek Muslims: ~15%

Turkey, a signatory state of the Lausanne Treaty, initially claimed the whole of the Muslim minority to be strictly an ethnic Turkish minority even though it actually consists of multiple ethnic groups. In his December 7, 2017 visit to Greece Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, acknowledged for the first time the multi-ethnic nature of the Western Thracian Muslim minority.[8][9][10][11]

The port of Alexandroupolis

Orestiada

Samothrace island

The last censuses which asked about ethnicity were held in the transitional period before the region became part of Greece. A number of estimates and censuses during the 1912-1920 period gave the following results about the ethnic distribution of the area that would become known as Western Thrace:[13]

The Pomak population depending on the source was sometimes counted together with the Turks (Muslims) following the Ottoman system of classifying people according to religion, while in other occasions was specified separately. According to the Bulgarian view, they are considered "Bulgarian Muslims" and an integral part of the Bulgarian nation.[13]

By the Bulgarian census in 1919, held on the request of the Entente,[14] of the population of Western Thrace[15] was 219,723 of whom: Turks 35.4% (77,726 Muslims), Bulgarians 46.3% (101,766 - 81,457 Christians and 20 309 Muslims), Greeks 14.8% (32,553 Christians), Jews 1.4% (3,066) Armenians 1.5% (2,369), others 0,9% (1,243). The area ceded to the Entente also included Karaagach and its environs, which became part of Turkey after the Treaty of Lausanne.

Metaxades

Western Thrace was ceded to the Entente in December 1919, after which many Bulgarians left the region, while many Greeks moved in. The Government of the Entente (led by French general Sharpe) held its own census in 1920,[16] according to which Western Thrace had a population of 204,700, of whom: Turks 36.5% (74,720 Muslims), Bulgarians 32.2% (65,927 = 54,079 Christians and 11,848 Muslims), Greeks 27.4% (56,114 Christians), Jews 1.5% (2,985) Armenians 0.9% (1,880), others 3,066. At the time this census was conducted, a part of the Greek population of Xanthi, who left massively the Xanthi district after the Balkan wars (1913), returned.[13]

According to the Turkish researches[17] the population of Western Thrace in 1923 was 191,699, of whom 129,120 (67%) were Turks/Muslims (also includes the Pomaks) and 33,910 (18%) were Greeks; the remaining 28,669 (15%) were mostly (Christian) Bulgarians, along with small numbers of Jews and Armenians (before the population exchange).

The population of the region, according to the official census of 1928 and 1951 conducted by the local authorities, per mother tongue, was as follows:[20]

Nestos river outside the city of Xanthi

• Abdera, an ancient Greek coastal town in the regional unit of Xanthi, is the birthplace of the Greek philosophers Democritus, considered by some the father of the atomic theory, and Protagoras, who is credited with having invented the role of the professional sophist or teacher of "virtue".
• Thrace and in particular the Rhodope mountains, its northern mountainous part, is home to one of the two surviving brown bear (species Ursus arctos) populations in Greece (the other is in the Pindus mountains, in central Greece).
• The Greek-Turkish border is a major entering point of illegal immigrants from Asia (Syrians, Kurds, Afghans, Pakistanis) trying to enter Europe.

• Northern Thrace
• Eastern Thrace
• Thrace
• Thracians
• List of Thracian Greeks
• Turks of Western Thrace
• Pomaks
• Muslim minority of Greece
• Provisional Government of Western Thrace
• Eastern Macedonia and Thrace
• Democritus University of Thrace
• The Holocaust in Bulgarian-occupied Greece

• Öksüz, Hikmet (2004), The Reasons for Immigration from Western Thrace to Turkey (1923-1950) (PDF), Turkish Review of Balkan Studies
• Whitman, Lois (1990), Destroying ethnic identity: the Turks of Greece, Human Rights Watch, ISBN 0-929692-70-5.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Western Thrace.

• Region of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace Archived 2005-05-29 at the Wayback Machine
• Combined Prefectural Authority of Drama, Kavala and Xanthi
• Combined Prefectural Authority of Rhodope and Evros
• Prefecture of Xanthi
• Thrakiki.gr
• Prefecture of Rhodope
• Prefecture of Evros
• Democritus University of Thrace
• Municipality of Feres

41.1000°N 25.4167°E / 41.1000; 25.4167