Why is Islam more common in the countries near the Adriatic Sea such as Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc and less common in the countries closer to Turkey like Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia?

by daimposter

I was looking at the Islamic population of Europe and found that the Muslim population for nations near Turkey is rather low compared to those on or near the Adriatic Sea. Seems rather odd to 'skip' over like that.

Chamboz

The modern population is not at all reflective of the historical distribution of the Muslim population. As noted by Anton Minkov, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the regions with the largest Muslim population tended to be those in the eastern half of the Balkans: Thrace, eastern and southern Bulgaria, and northern Greece.^1 By the 1830s the population of the Balkans was between 33 and 42% Muslim, not just concentrated in the regions which still have large Muslim populations nowadays.^2 But as the borders of the Ottoman Empire shrank the Muslim population either fled or was ethnically cleansed. The Muslims of Serbia largely fled once that country gained autonomy in 1830, moving instead to Kosovo and Macedonia. Most of the Muslims of Bulgaria likewise fled or were forced out once independence was achieved, leading to the exile of 574,000 of them between 1880 and 1945.^3 The Muslims of Greece were forcibly transferred to Turkey by mutual agreement between the two countries in 1923, uprooting some 500,000 people, in addition to those who had already fled the country. The 20th century Ottoman Empire (and subsequently Turkey) was thus a country flooded with millions of Muslim refugees both from the Balkans and the Russian Empire and continued to receive them in even greater numbers after the conclusion of the Balkan Wars of 1912-3. A significant proportion of the modern Turkish population are their descendants. Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia happen to be the places where the Ottoman-era Muslim population has survived, but Muslims certainly used to exist elsewhere as well.

  1. Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670-1730, (Leiden: Brill, 2004) 43.
  2. Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade, and the Struggle for Land, 1600-1800, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) 85.
  3. Antonina Zhelyazkova, "Islamization in the Balkans as a Historiographical Problem: The Southeast-European Perspective," in Fikret Adanir and Suraiya Faroqhi, eds. The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of Historiography, (Brill, 2002), pp. 235-6.
lappet

I don't want to discourage new answers, but there appears to be an older thread regarding this. The top comment by /u/UrbisPreturbis is very extensive and addresses some of your questions.

Govika

First, in which time period are you meaning? 500 years ago, or modern times or somewhere between or else?

Also, what is low? Total population numbers or percentages? It may be due to low population in one or more countries.

Also, what data are you observing?