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Are there an ethnic/religious minority in your country that is there primarily because of an event in another country?

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r/AskBalkans - Are there an ethnic/religious minority in your country that is there primarily because of an event in another country?
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u/Alien_reg avatar

Bulgarian Armenians, take a wild guess about the event

u/AnarchistRain avatar

We used to have a bunch of white guard Russians fleeing their defeat in the Civil War, but they have mostly assimilated.

Oh that's fascinating. I remember reading about White Russians going to China after the civil war and they were actually very successful at business and fostering a community there. No idea what happened to them though.

Probably nothing good after 1947.

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Same here

Does that mean that ethnic Russians who didn't have "-ov" surnames get Bulgarized within the generations?

The suffix itself is can't be used as indicator. You can identify and spot Russian or Ukrainian family names occasionally. Our law doesn't enforce family or surname naming conventions, apart from sublings having the same family name. I know of assimilated russians, inter marriages etc. I don't know of old closed community diasporas of russians. I know of russians living here but they have moved with the last 40 years or so. My guess is that within two generations they will be integrated, not necessarily assimilated(yet).

Bulgarian turks and roma, on the other hand are more closed and distinct. The former are well functioning part of society but the latter are in 90% hard to fully and effectively be aligned with how live goes for almost everyone else that lives here.

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Lipovans are in Romania because of a 17th century religious crisis within the Russian Orthodox Church which resulted in a schism; Armenians moved in the Romanian Principalities after the fall of Ani.

u/bluepilldbeta avatar

Ari is so far away though. Why do these guys always move to unrelated places?

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u/No-Elk3613 avatar

The Transylvanian Saxons maybe?

u/Poglavnik_Majmuna01 avatar

Serbs of Croatia and Western Bosnia are a direct result of the Ottoman empire’s conquests.

u/MISTER_WORLDWIDE avatar
Edited

Serbs in western and northern Bosnia are a direct result of the Ottoman Empire’s conquests.

However, Serbs were resettled into Croatia around the borders of Bosnia by the Hungarians to defend against Ottoman conquests. So, it was more of the Hungarians not wanting to use their own people.

The pre-war ethnic map really shows the strategic placement of the Serb population.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Hrvatskaetno1991.pdf

All around the areas where the Ottomans could have penetrated central Croatia.

By the Hungarians? When? I think you'll find it was the Habsburgs, not the Hungarians. The Military Frontier was created during their rule, after the collapse of Hungary in the first quarter of the 16th century.

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u/Dull_Cucumber_3908 avatar

Probably the (now called) Greek Jews were initially refugees from other European countries, when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire.

Romiote (Roman) Jews are the Jews of Greece that have been there since antiquity. Are you referring to the Sephardic Jews the Turks brought in?

Are these the Romaniotes, or the Sephardi?

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Circassians

u/Kuku_Nan avatar

Fun fact: in Kosovo, both Albanians and Serbs joined together and petitioned the sultan to remove Circassians from Kosovo during the 1860s. Most ended up leaving in the 1870s, tho only to fight Bulgarian rebels.

u/bluepilldbeta avatar

Why were they not wanted?

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If you replace "ethnic" with "linguistic" Italy is ripe of such situations, situations that resulted mostly in "language islands":

We have some small towns in Southern Italy with centuries-old Croatian, Greek and Albanian minorities due to the Ottoman invasion of the Byzantine empire. (According to some linguists the Greek refugees absorbed older communities that still spoke Greek from classical times, but it is debated)

We have also 2 isolated small towns in southern Italy's Apulia that speak a variety of Franco-provençal: one theory says that they are descendants of Waldensians that escaped French persecutions while another says that they are descendants of 13th century mercenaries that fought for the Anjou dynasty.

We have in Southern Italy's Calabria also a small town (Guardia Piemontese) that speaks Occitan, this town was founded in the 12th century by Waldensians that escaped persecution from France and parts of Piedmont. Centuries later they were forcibly converted to Catholicism(those who were not killed) but they managed to keep their language alive.

There are also many other small language islands in Italy, but they do not fit your criteria because thy are either the result of conquest (Like Catalan spoke in the Sardinian city of Alghero) or they originated from other distant parts of Italy (such as certain towns of Sicily and Basilicata that speak Gallo-Italic dialects ) or they are simply minorities that live near the border (like Slovenians ) or are strictly related to languages spoken in bordering countries.

Not an ethnic, but a regional/dialectical minority. There are a lot of Serbs from neighboring countries that were expelled during the 20th century and had to flee into the state of Serbia.

Turks who fled the Balkans, Circassians, Turks who came from Greece in the Population Exchange, Sephardic Jews (although most of them are in Israel now), and unfortunately Syrians

u/alpidzonka avatar

Ashkali maybe, or Sephardi Jews?

u/ArdaBogaz avatar

I mean thats basically everyone in Turkey lol

There are Polish people here in Turkey. They took refuge here after their rebellions against Russians failed in 19th century.

Edited

Turks and Albanians even, living in Macedonia from the Ottoman rule

u/No-Read4676 avatar

Albanians, we took them as refugees during the Balkan war, they were good guests unlike Syrians, Iraqis and Palestinians.

u/Zehrathustra avatar

I think even if Turkey took half of the Albanians (they took very few) in the 1900s they would not been a minority. If you are talking about the wars of the early 20th century, then now there are 2-3 million syrians in turkey in the annexed provinces

u/No-Read4676 avatar

Didn't you get banned for harassing Turks? Is it thid a new alt?

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u/maks7002 avatar

I have two

  1. There’s a group of Croatians in a region of Italy called Aquavina Collecroce that was settled by these Croatians around 500 years ago after some Ottoman conquests and not wanting to conform. It’s pretty cool they speak like an archaic Croatian-Italian dialect hybrid. YouTuber by the name of Bentherules did a video on its history and people I recommend it.

  2. bunch of ethnic Turks living in the North part of Macedonia still some of them stayed because they were too poor to go back, in classic balkan fashion, and others liked the way of life and settled down.

u/Dalmatino1 avatar

Acquaviva Collecroce (Kruč).

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Not an ethnic minority, but Kosovos Albanian population got a big boost because of the ethnic cleansing done by the Serbia in 1878, thus making Albanians move from what is now central Serbia to Kosovo.

All the villages and neighborhoods that end with a"i/e Muhaxherëve" (of the Refugees), are locations where the said refugees settled down, but that's not all.

A lot of people bare the family name Muhaxheri or have as a family name the name of the Location from where their family hailed from. They are all descendants of those refugees. I am also partially a descendant of them (1/4)