Albanians in Turkey

Albanians in Turkey
Shqiptarët në Turqi
Türkiye'deki Arnavutlar
Total population
(500,000 to 5,000,000 [1][2][3][4])
Regions with significant populations
Marmara Region, Tokat and Samsun
Languages
Albanian, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian
Religion
Islam, Irreligious

Albanians in Turkey (Albanian: Shqiptarët në Turqi, Turkish: Türkiye'deki Arnavutlar) are ethnic Albanian citizens and denizens of Turkey. They consist of Albanians who arrived during the Ottoman period, Kosovar/Macedonian and Tosk Cham Albanians fleeing from Serbian and Greek persecution after the beginning of the Balkan Wars, alongside some Albanians from Montenegro and Albania proper.[5] A 2008 report from the Turkish National Security Council (MGK) estimated that approximately 1.3 million people of Albanian ancestry live in Turkey, and more than 500,000 recognizing their ancestry, language and culture. There are other estimates however that place the number of people in Turkey with Albanian ancestry and or background upward to 5 million.[1][2][4]

Demographics

In the census of 1965, 12,832 Turkish citizens spoke Albanian as first language, which is only 0.04% of the population. These people were mostly living in Bursa (0.3%), Sakarya (0.2%), Tokat (0.2%) and Istanbul (0.2%). Another 390,613 spoke Albanian as second language.

According to a 2008 report prepared for the National Security Council of Turkey by academics of three Turkish universities in eastern Anatolia, there were approximately 1,300,000 people of Albanian descent living in Turkey.[6][3] According to that study, more than 500,000 Albanian descendants still recognize their ancestry and or their language, culture and traditions.[7][3] In a 2011 survey, 0.2% within Turkey or roughly 150,000 people identify themselves as Albanian.[8]

There are also other estimates regarding the Albanian population in Turkey that range from being 3-4 million people[7] up to a total of 5 million in number, although most of these are Turkish citizens of either full or partial Albanian ancestry being no longer fluent in Albanian (cf. German Americans).[1][2][4] This was due to various degrees of either linguistic and or cultural assimilation occurring amongst the Albanian diaspora in Turkey.[2] Nonetheless, a sizable proportion of the Albanian community in Turkey, such as that of Istanbul, has maintained its distinct Albanian identity.[2]

History

The Ottoman period that followed in Albania after the end of Skanderbeg's resistance was characterized by a great change. Many Albanians gained prominent positions in the Ottoman government such as: Iljaz Hoxha, Hamza Kastrioti, Koca Davud Pasha, Zağanos Pasha, Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (head of the Köprülü family of Grand Viziers), the Bushati family, Sulejman Pasha, Edhem Pasha, Nezim Frakulla, Haxhi Shekreti, Hasan Zyko Kamberi, Ali Pasha of Gucia, Muhammad Ali of Egypt and Ali Pasha of Tepelena who rose to become one of the most powerful Muslim Albanian rulers in western Rumelia. As such, there has been a considerable presence of Albanians in parts of the former Ottoman Empire in areas such as Anatolia due to the Ottoman administration and military.

Migration and formation of the Albanian diaspora in Turkey

The Albanian diaspora in Turkey was formed during the Ottoman era through economic migration and early years of the Turkish republic through migration due to sociopolitical discrimination and violence experienced by Albanians in Balkan countries.[5] Albanian migration to Turkey occurred during three distinctive phases.[5] The first was during the Ottoman era when Albanians served as Ottoman bureaucrats, seasonal employees or in the military drawn to Istanbul, the then capital and the nearby area of the Marmara region.[5] Members of the Albanian community from this group have for the most part assimilated into Turkish society, with small numbers regarding themselves as Albanians.[5] It is unknown if or to what degree individuals in contemporary times from this group have fluency or knowledge of the Albanian language.[5] The second phase was during the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Albanians fled persecution and became refugees as the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating due to conflict.[5] Migrating toward Eastern Thrace and Anatolia these Albanians form the largest portion of the Albanian community in Turkey.[5] Other Albanians who fled from the Sanjak of Niş settled in the Samsun region.[5] Of all those who settled in villages where Albanians became or are the only population, the language has been retained to various degrees, whereas in ethnically mixed areas language retention has been obsolete.[5] In 1923 Muslim Albanians from the Florina, Kastoria and some from the Chameria area arrived from Greece due to the Greco-Turkish population exchange which was done according to religious affiliation and not based on linguistic or other differences.[9] Some of them have populated the areas of Erenköy and Kartal in Istanbul,[10] as well as a number of towns in the area of Bursa, especially Mudanya.[11] The third phase of Albanian migration to Turkey involves the post-world war two period until 1999.[5] Albanian migrants during this era originated from Yugoslavia, in particular Kosovo during the 1950s–1970s often due to discrimination and or pressure exhibited by the state on Albanians to declare themselves Turkish and migrate to Turkey.[12][5][13] Many of these Albanians settled in urban centres such as Izmir, Gemlik and Aydin.[14] With the fall of communism, some Albanians arrived from Albania to Turkey after 1992.[5] In 1999, some Albanians arrived to Turkey fleeing the conflict in Kosovo.[5][15] Albanians from this third group have mainly settled in large urban centres located in western areas of Turkey.[5]

Albanians in Turkey today and transnational links with Balkan Albanians

There are Albanian language schools in Turkey. The Turkish-Albanian Brotherhood Culture and Solidarity Association aims to preserve Albanian culture and traditions by hosting cultural nights and folklore festivals. This organization based in Bayrampaşa (Istanbul) has three branches located in Küçükçekmece and in the provinces of Ankara and Bursa. It also provides Albanian language classes throughout the year and organizes celebrations to commemorate the independence of Albania.

Albanians are active in the civic life of Turkey.[7][16] For example, after the Turks and Kurds, Albanians are the third most represented ethnic group of parliamentarians in the Turkish parliament, though belonging to different political parties.[16] The Albanian diaspora in Turkey lobbied the Turkish government for recognition of Kosovo's independence by Turkey.[17] State relations of Albania and Kosovo with Turkey are friendly and close, due to the Albanian population of Turkey maintaining close links with Albanians of the Balkans and vice versa and also Turkey maintaining close socio-political, cultural, economic and military ties with Albania and Kosovo.[7][16][17][18] Turkey has been supportive of Albanian geopolitical interests within the Balkans.[17] The current AKP Turkish political leadership has acknowledged that there are large numbers of people with Albanian origins within Turkey, more than so in Albania and Kosovo combined and are aware of their influence and impact on domestic Turkish politics.[17] In Gallup polls conducted in recent times, Turkey is viewed as a friendly country with a positive image amongst a large majority of people in Albania, Kosovo and the Republic of Macedonia which contains a sizable Albanian minority.[17]

Cham Albanians in Turkey

Muslim Chams in Turkey form the second largest community of Chams, after Albania.[19] This community was established after the two World Wars. After the First World War, Chams were forced to leave for Turkey during the population exchange,[10][20][21] and another migration wave followed after the Second World War, when a minority of the Chams expelled from Greece chose Turkey over Albania because of their anti-communist sentiments.[14]

The exact number of Muslim Chams in Turkey is unknown, but various estimates conclude that they number between 80,000 and 100,000,[14] from a total population of 1.3 to 6 million Albanians that live in Turkey. The Chameria Human Rights Association declares that most of them have been linguistically assimilated, although they maintain Albanian consciousness and regional Cham traditions.[22] A considerable number of Chams in Turkey have changed their surnames to Cam or Cami, which in Turkish means pine, in order to preserve their origin.[14] They are organized within the "Albanian-Turkish Brotherhood Association" (Albanian: Shoqëria e Vllazërisë Shqiptaro-Turke, Turkish: Türk-Arnavut Kardeşliği Derneği), which fights for the rights of Albanians.[14]

Famous Albanians of Turkey

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Albanians in Turkey.

References

Citations

  1. 1 2 3 Deliso 2007, p. 38.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Saunders 2011, p. 98.
  3. 1 2 3 "Türkiye'deki Kürtlerin sayısı!" (in Turkish). 6 June 2008. Archived from the original on 2010-11-13. Retrieved 8 September 2010.
  4. 1 2 3 Yenigun 2009, p. 184. "Turkey contains 5-6 million Albanians (more than in the Balkan area)"
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Geniş & Maynard 2009, pp. 553–555. "Taking a chronological perspective, the ethnic Albanians currently living in Turkey today could be categorized into three groups: Ottoman Albanians, Balkan Albanians, and twentieth century Albanians. The first category comprises descendants of Albanians who relocated to the Marmara and Aegean regions as part of the Ottoman Empire's administrative structure. Official Ottoman documents record the existence of Albanians living in and around Istanbul (Constantinople), Iznik (Nicaea), and Izmir (Smyrna). For example, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries Albanian boys were brought to Istanbul and housed in Topkapı Palace as part of the devşirme system (an early Ottoman practice of human tribute required of Christian citizens) to serve as civil servants and Janissaries. In the 1600s Albanian seasonal workers were employed by these Albanian Janissaries in and around Istanbul and Iznik, and in 1860 Kayserili Ahmet, the governor of Izmir, employed Albanians to fight the raiding Zeybeks. Today, the descendants of Ottoman Albanians do not form a community per se, but at least some still identify as ethnically Albanian. However, it is unknown how many, if any, of these Ottoman Albanians retain Albanian language skills. The second category of ethnic Albanians living in modern Turkey is composed of people who are the descendants of refugees from the Balkans who because of war were forced to migrate inwards towards Eastern Thrace and Anatolia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the Ottoman Empire dissolved. These Balkan Albanians are the largest group of ethnic Albanians living in Turkey today, and can be subcategorized into those who ended up in actual Albanian-speaking communities and those who were relocated into villages where they were the only Albanian-speaking migrants. Not surprisingly, the language is retained by some of the descendants from those of the former, but not those of the latter. The third category of ethnic Albanians in Turkey comprises recent or twentieth century migrants from the Balkans. These recent migrants can be subcategorized into those who came from Kosovo in the 1950s–1970s, those who came from Kosovo in 1999, and those who came from the Republic of Albania after 1992. All of these in the third category know a variety of modern Albanian and are mostly located in the western parts of Turkey in large metropolitan areas. Our research focuses on the history of migration and community formation of the Albanians located in the Samsun Province in the Black Sea region around 1912–1913 who would fall into the second category discussed above (see Figure 1). Turkish census data between 1927 and 1965 recorded the presence of Albanian speakers in Samsun Province, and the fieldwork we have been conducting in Samsun since September 2005 has revealed that there is still a significant number of Albanians living in the city and its surrounding region. According to the community leaders we interviewed, there are about 30,000–40,000 ethnic Albanian Turkish citizens in Samsun Province. The community was largely rural, located in the villages and engaged in agricultural activities until the 1970s. After this time, gradual migration to urban areas, particularly smaller towns and nearby cities has been observed. Long-distance rural-to-urban migration also began in later years mostly due to increasing demand for education and better jobs. Those who migrated to areas outside of Samsun Province generally preferred the cities located in the west of Turkey, particularly metropolitan areas such as Istanbul, Izmir and Bursa mainly because of the job opportunities as well as the large Albanian communities already residing in these cities. Today, the size of the Albanian community in Samsun Province is considered to be much smaller and gradually shrinking because of outward migration. Our observation is that the Albanians in Samsun seem to be fully integrated into Turkish society, and engaged in agriculture and small trading businesses. As education becomes accessible to the wider society and modernization accelerates transportation and hence communication of urban values, younger generations have also started to acquire professional occupations. Whilst a significant number of people still speak Albanian fluently as the language in the family, they have a perfect command of the Turkish language and cannot be distinguished from the rest of the population in terms of occupation, education, dress and traditions. In this article, we are interested in the history of this Albanian community in Samsun. Given the lack of any research on the Albanian presence in Turkey, our questions are simple and exploratory. When and where did these people come from? How and why did they choose Samsun as a site of resettlement? How did the socio-cultural characteristics of this community change over time? It is generally believed that the Albanians in Samsun Province are the descendants of the migrants and refugees from Kosovo who arrived in Turkey during the wars of 1912–13. Based on our research in Samsun Province, we argue that this information is partial and misleading. The interviews we conducted with the Albanian families and community leaders in the region and the review of Ottoman history show that part of the Albanian community in Samsun was founded through three stages of successive migrations. The first migration involved the forced removal of Muslim Albanians from the Sancak of Nish in 1878; the second migration occurred when these migrants’ children fled from the massacres in Kosovo in 1912–13 to Anatolia; and the third migration took place between 1913 and 1924 from the scattered villages in Central Anatolia where they were originally placed to the Samsun area in the Black Sea Region. Thus, the Albanian community founded in the 1920s in Samsun was in many ways a reassembling of the demolished Muslim Albanian community of Nish. This trajectory of the Albanian community of Nish shows that the fate of this community was intimately bound up with the fate of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the socio-cultural composition of modern Turkey still carries on the legacy of its historical ancestor."
  6. ↑ Milliyet, Türkiyedeki Kürtlerin Sayısı. 2008-06-06.
  7. 1 2 3 4 "Albanians in Turkey celebrate their cultural heritage Archived 31 October 2015 at the Wayback Machine.". Today's Zaman. 21 August 2011. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  8. ↑ Genar - Araştırma Danışmanlık Eğitim
  9. ↑ Baltsiotis 2011. para. 28-29; footnote 48.
  10. 1 2 Fabbe, Kristin (18 October 2007). "Defining Minorities and Identities - Religious Categorization and State-Making Strategies in Greece and Turkey" (PDF). Washington, United States of America: Presentation at: The Graduate Student Pre-Conference in Turkish and Turkic Studies University of Washington. p. 49.
  11. ↑ Yildirim 2006, p. 121.
  12. ↑ Daskalovski 2003, p. 20.
  13. ↑ Emmert & Ingrao, p. 94.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 Berisha, Mal (November 2000). Diaspora Shqiptare në Turqi (in Albanian). New York: ACCL Publishing. p. 13.
  15. ↑ Hale 2002, p. 265.
  16. 1 2 3 Tabak, Hüsrev (03 March 2013). "Albanian awakening: The worm has turned! Archived 17 July 2015 at the Wayback Machine.". Today's Zaman. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  17. 1 2 3 4 5 Petrović & Reljić 2011, p. 162. "However, there are not only historical memories which tie Turkey and south-east Europe but also current political issues. Turkish leaders say that up to 10 million Turkish citizens can trace their ancestry to the Western Balkans. Several waves of migration during the 20th century of both Turks and Slavic Muslims brought hundreds of thousands of Balkan migrants to Turkey and reinforced the cultural and familial ties with the region. Consequently, the turmoil in Yugoslavia in the 1990s generated significant popular pressure in Turkey to react and protect its kin-peoples, the Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sandžak, and the Albanians in Kosovo. Davutoğlu often underlines that there are more people of Bosnian origin and people of Albanian origin in Turkey than in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo or Albania. Thus, conflicts in the region of former Yugoslavia have a direct impact on domestic politics in Turkey. In Davutoğlu's words, "We are paying the bill for our Ottoman history because whenever there is a crisis in the Balkans (Bosnians, Albanians, Turks in Bulgaria...) they look to Istanbul." Nonetheless, the Western Balkan diaspora in Turkey is evidently not unique in its pressure on Ankara to pursue specific policy goals according to the diaspora's requests. The pressure of the Bosniak diaspora in the 1990s and of the Albanian diaspora for the recognition of Kosovo mirrors examples of similar pressures from the Abkhaz and the Chechen communities in Turkey on behalf of the recognition of Abkhazia and advocating strong reactions to the Russian crackdowns in the northern Caucasus."' p. 166. "In Albania, Turkish schools enjoy the reputation of being among the best and are attended by approximately 3,000 students per year. In addition, Turkish universities receive Albanian students, according to some unofficial estimates up to 1,500, and, similarly, 100 students per year from Kosovo receive state scholarships from Turkey to attend Turkish universities."; p. 169. "For critics of Turkish activism in the Western Balkans, one of the most evident contradictions in Ankara's policy is the support for the secession of Kosovo Albanians. Ankara has indeed been Priština's staunch promoter (and an enthusiastic participant in NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999) despite being plagued by a similar secessionist problem with its Kurdish minority."; p. 170. "A positive image of Turkey is not omnipresent in the Western Balkans, including in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to the Gallup Balkan 2010 Monitor, just about 40 percent of the population of this state considers Turkey to be a "friendly country." This figure corresponds more or less to the number of Bosniaks (in comparison, corresponding figure in other countries are: in Serbia 15 percent, Croatia 24 percent, Albania 73 percent, Kosovo 85 percent, Republic of Macedonia 80 percent—this is mainly because of Turkish support for Skopje in the "name dispute" with Athens)."
  18. ↑ "Genci Muçaj: Albania enjoys magnificent relations with Turkey". Koha Jonë. 14 Mars 2015. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
  19. ↑ Vickers, Miranda. The Cham Issue - Where to Now? (PDF). Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.
  20. ↑ Roudometof 2002, p. 182.
  21. ↑ Mai, Nicola; Schwandner-Sievers, Stephanie (2005). Russell, King, ed. The New Albanian Migration. Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press. p. 87. ISBN 978-1-903900-78-9. 978-1-903900-78-9. Retrieved 2009-03-31.
  22. ↑ Bollati, Sali; Vehbi Bajrami (June 2005). "Interview with the head of Chameria organization / Bollati: Chameria today" (in Albanian and English). New York, United States of America. Iliria Newspaper.

Sources

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 12/1/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.