Muhacir is a term referring to Ottoman Muslim citizens and their descendants born after the onset of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Muhacirs overwhelmingly self-identified as Muslims and their numbers are estimated in the millions.: "Muslims had been the majority in Anatolia, the Crimea, the Balkans, and the Caucasus and a plurality in southern Russia and sections of Romania. Most of these lands were within or contiguous with the Ottoman Empire. By 1923, 'only Anatolia, eastern Thrace, and a section of the southeastern Caucasus remained to the Muslim land ... Millions of Muslims, most of them Turks, had died; millions more had fled to what is today Turkey. Between 1821 and 1922, more than five million Muslims were driven from their lands. Five and one-half million Muslims died, some of them killed in wars, others perishing as refugees from starvation and disease' (McCarthy 1995, 1). Since people in the Ottoman Empire were classified by religion, Turks, Albanians, Bosnians, and all other Muslim groups were recognized—and recognized themselves—simply as Muslims. Hence, their persecution and forced migration is of central importance to an analysis of 'Muslim migration.'": "The main migrations started from Crimea in 1856 and were followed by those from the Caucasus and the Balkans in 1862 to 1878 and 1912 to 1916. These have continued to our day. The quantitative indicators cited in various sources show that during this period a total of about 7 million migrants from Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands settled in Anatolia. These immigrants were overwhelmingly Muslim, except for a number of Jews who left their homes in the Balkans and Russia in order to live in the Ottoman lands. By the end of the century the immigrants and their descendants constituted some 30 to 40 percent of the total population of Anatolia, and in some western areas their percentage was even higher." ... "The immigrants called themselves Muslims rather than Turks, although most of those from Bulgaria, Macedonia, and eastern Serbia descended from the Turkish Anatolian stock who settled in the Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." The refugees from North Macedonia, Bulgaria, and parts of Serbia and Romania had primarily Anatolian Turkish background. Other backgrounds included Albanians, Bosniaks, Chechens, Circassians, Crimean Tatars, Pomaks, Macedonian Muslims, Greek Muslims, Serb Muslims, Georgian Muslims, Ossetian MuslimsGiorgi Chochiev, “Evolution of a North Caucasian Community in Late Ottoman and Republican Turkey: The Case of Anatolian Ossetians,” in Anthony Gorman and Sossie Kasbarian, eds., Diasporas of the Modern Middle East: Contextualising Community, Edinburgh, p. 106. and Muslim Roma.
They immigrated to modern-day Turkey, mostly in the 19th and early 20th centuries to escape the persecution of Ottoman Muslims by Christians in territories formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire.: "The emerging Christian nation states justified the prosecution of their Muslims by arguing that they were their former 'suppressors'. The historical balance: between about 1820 and 1920, millions of Muslim casualties and refugees back to the remaining Ottoman Empire had to be registered; estimations speak about 5 million casualties and the same number of displaced persons" Further migration from Bulgaria occurred from 1940 to 1990.: "In total, many millions of Turks (or, more precisely, Muslim immigrants, including some from the Caucasus) were involved in this 'repatriation' – sometimes more than once in a lifetime – the last stage of which may have been the immigration of seven hundred thousand Turks from Bulgaria between 1940 and 1990. Most of these immigrants settled in urban north-western Anatolia. Today between a third and a quarter of the Republic’s population are descendants of these Muslim immigrants, known as Muhacir or Göçmen" Up to a third of the modern-day population of Turkey may have ancestry from these Turkish and other Muslim migrants.
Muhacir immigration to Turkey Approximately 5-7 million Muslim migrants arrived in Ottoman Anatolia and modern Turkey from 1783 to 2016 from the Balkans (Bulgaria, 1.15-1.5 million; Greece, 1.2 million; Romania, 400,000; Yugoslavia, 800,000; Russia, 500,000; the Caucasus, 900,000, of whom two-thirds remained, the rest going to Syria, Jordan and Cyprus; and Syria, 500,000, mostly as a result of the Syrian Civil War in 2011). Of these, 4 million came by 1924; 1.3 million, post-1934 to 1945; and more than 1.2 million, before the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.
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 the Balkan War of 1912-13 and the First World War. These refugees viewed the Ottoman Empire, and subsequently the Republic of Turkey, as a protective "motherland". Many Muhacirs escaped to Anatolia as a result of the widespread persecution of Ottoman Muslims by Christians during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.
Thereafter, with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, a large influx of Turks, as well as other Muslims, from the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Aegean islands, Cyprus, the Sanjak of Alexandretta (İskenderun), the Middle East, and the Soviet Union continued to arrive in the region, settling mostly in urban north-western Anatolia. During the Circassian genocide, 800,000–1,500,000 Muslim Circassians were systematically mass-murdered, ethnically cleansed, and expelled from Circassia in the aftermath of the Russo-Circassian War (1763–1864). In 1923, more than half a million ethnic Muslims of various nationalities arrived from Greece as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey—an exchange based not on ethnicity but religious affiliation.
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.
From the 1930s to 2016, migration added two million Muslims in Turkey. The majority of these were Balkan Turks who faced harassment and discrimination. New waves of Turks and other Muslims expelled from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia 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.
More recently, Meskhetian Turks have immigrated to Turkey from former Soviet Union states (particularly Ukraine after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014); and many Iraqi Turkmen and Syrian Turkmen took refuge in Turkey due to the Iraq War (2003–2011) and the Syrian Civil War (2011–2024). Although more than 3.7 million Syrians migrated to Turkey since the Syrian Civil War, the classification of Syrian refugees as Muhacirs has been described as controversial and politically charged.
Muhacir emigration by country or region In this section, each Muhacir emigration will be looked at according to the place from which it originated.
Algeria
Initially, the first wave of Muhacir emigration occurred in 1830, when many Algerian Turks were forced to leave the region following the French conquest of Algeria. Approximately 10,000 Turks were relocated to Smyrna (currently Izmir) in Turkey, whilst many others also migrated to Palestine, Syria, Arabia, and Egypt.
Bulgaria
+ Turkish migrations from Bulgaria, 1878-1992 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 the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829), when around 30,000 Bulgarian Turks arrived in Turkey. The second wave of about 750,000 emigrants left Bulgaria during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, but approximately one-fourth of them died on the way. More than 200,000 of the rest remained inside the present borders of Turkey, whilst the others were sent to other parts of the Ottoman Empire. The aftermath of the war led to major demographic restructuring of Bulgaria's ethnic and religious make-up.
As a result of these emigrations, 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. Substantial numbers of Turks continued to emigrate to Turkey during and following the Balkan Wars and the First World War, in accordance with compulsory exchange of population agreements between Greece, 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.
Communist rule after the Second World War ended most emigration from Bulgaria, but further bilateral agreements were negotiated in the early 1950s and late 1960s to regulate the outflow of Bulgarian Turks. Heavy taxation, nationalisation of private minority schools, and measures against Turkish culture in the name of the modernisation of Bulgaria, built up great pressure for the Turkish minority to emigrate; and, when exit restrictions were relaxed in 1950, many ethnic Turks applied to leave. In August 1950, the Bulgarian government announced that 250,000 ethnic Turks had made applications to emigrate and pressured Turkey to accept them within three months. 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 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 the Marmara and Aegean regions of Turkey, helped by the distribution of land and the provision of housing. 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.
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 a campaign of forced assimilation. 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 speaking Turkish in public places, then intensified in the winter of 1985 to make ethnic Turks change their names to Bulgarian Slavic ones.
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.