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TURKS, RUMELIAN 821
territories, following more or less ethnic divisions of the area, such as Bosnia,
Macedonia or Morea.
Although Ottomans were the rulers in Rumeli until about the mid-nineteenth
century, or until various Balkan nations gained their independence, Turks have
always been in the minority except in Turkish Thrace. Because of religious,
linguistic and social differences, Turkish settlers in the Balkans did not intermarry
in large numbers or mix with the indigenous Christian and Albanian or Bosnian
populations. Probably such intermarriage as occurred involved men marrying
non-Turkish women. The Turks were mostly settled in towns in the Balkans and
served as military personnel and administrators, and as artisans. Land was granted
to individuals, usually of the military class, as fiefs in the Balkans from the
Ottoman crown holdings. Since ownership of such land was not inherited, it
eventually reverted back to the state. Therefore, no Turkish landed noble class
developed, and Turkish peasants in the Balkans were rare, with the exception
of Dobruja. After annexation of the Crimean khanate to czarist Russia in the
late eighteenth century, many Tatars from the Crimea and Circassians from the
Caucasus migrated to Dobruja and were given land by the Ottoman government,
where they formed villages and became farmers. The Dobruja Turks remain a
distinctive cultural entity to this day.
After Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania became independent
countries in the nineteenth century, many urban Turks living in the Balkans
left, and the population of Rumelian Turks was reduced by several million.
Following World War I, 400,000 Turks from Greece and the Greek islands were
exchanged with Greeks in Anatolia who moved to Greece. After World War II,
about 200,000 more Turks were repatriated to Turkey from Bulgaria and Romania.
Today there are only about 1.5 million Rumelian Turks living in Romania,
Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece. In Turkey many of the returning Rumelian
Turks, estimated at 5.5 million, have been given land, and today one finds their
villages throughout Anatolia referred to as gocmen, or "immigrant villages,"
by the local people. The Dobruja Turks returning to Turkey have been assimilated
in large numbers into the Turkish professional classes and serve in most governmental
organizations.
Even today the signs of long Turkish-Ottoman domination are apparent everywhere.
The most obvious is in architecture, especially in the still Muslim areas
of southern Yugoslavia. Ottoman-style domed mosques with their pencil-thin
minarets modeled after those in Islanbul, wooden houses with latticework windows
and separate quarters for men and women and marketplaces where specialty
stores are grouped together are living legacy of Turkish rule. Less obvious to
the casual observer are the cuisine, the social customs and a large number of
loan words from Turkish that are still very much in use in all Balkan states.
Turkish words are especially widespread in conjunction with clothing, household
items, parts of a building, cooking, farm products, hunting and things equestrian.
Turkish dishes containing lamb and vegetables, milk products—such as yogurt