Were there ever any ethnically Greek Ottoman Muslim communities? People who dressed and conversed in Greek and considered themselves Greeks not as Turks?

by New_Pakistani

The uniform answer to this is always 'The Ottomans didn't record ethnicities, but based their segregations on religion.' Which may be true, but surely everyday citizens didn't base their own ideas of themselves on what a government document stated?

So were there any ethnically Greek Muslim communities, by this I mean Ottoman citizens who would be Greek-speaking as a mother tongue but still Muslim?

bosth

The Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians of Anatolia are more famous, but there were also Greek-speaking Muslims, too.

Probably the most notable community was that of Crete (Giritli in Turkish), and they used Greek written in the Arabic alphabet (the term Aljamiado is sometimes employed here) as a nod to their different religion.

Non-Albanian Muslims in what would become mainland Greece were much more likely to have a Turkish identity and use the Turkish language. Nevertheless, all Muslims outside Western Thrace were subject to the forced population transfers following the Greek-Turkish war in the 1920s, no matter what their language or identity was.

For the practice of writing Greek in the Arabic alphabet, see "Blame it on the Turko-Romanioi" by Yorgos Dedes in a larger volume Between Religion and Language, which looks into the use of language and script amongst different Ottoman communities (e.g. the writing Turkish in Armenian, Greek, Hebrew or Syriac letters).