Ethnic and Religious Groups of Greece

Demographics

Religion

• Christianity (98%): 30,868,794
  • (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity (96.39%): 30,362,706
  • (Oriental) Orthodox Christianity (1.07%): 335,978
  • Catholicism (.04%): 12,600
    • Latin Rite: 10,336
    • Armenian Rite: 2,264
  • Protestant (.03%): 9,450
    • 100% Lutheran
  • Apollinarian Church of Cyrene (.03%): 8,312
  • Assyrian Church of the East (Nestorian) (.02%): 6,334
• Islam (.61%): 192,150
• Judaism (.48%): 152,344
• Sabbatianianism (.24%): 75,662
• Atheism, Agnosticism, and other (.67%): 141,750

Ethnicities

Dönme

Karakajlar

("J" in Volapük is "ş" in real-life Turkish)

Muslims

Vlachs (Karatzovalides)

The few Muslim Vlachs of Greece (and Turkey) are the only indigenous Muslim group in the world outside of Spain and Dalmatia. They're the primary Romance language but Muslim group in Greece as they greatly outnumber the few non-Slavic (or Turkish)-speaking Bosniaks left in Greece. Their ancestors converted to Islam in the 1700's only to maintain their land from encroaching settlers of a Turkic or Pomak variety. Muslims got top pick of the arable land and the Ottoman authorities had no qualms about expelling the locals into barely inhabitable areas like swamps and mountains. Unlike anywhere else in the tiny, Vlach-speaking islands that dotted the Balkan mainland, the people of one village, Nânti (also known as "Nânta" with an "a"), beat the oncoming settlers at their own game and mumbled the shahada in front of two (already Muslim) witnesses. As fellow Muslims, they could not be disenfranchised. Their veneer of Islam has always been thin. Only after the First World War was a mosque even built in Nânti because the follow up treaty to the Treaty of Versailles signed by the Ottoman sultanate, Greece, Federated Kingdoms, France, Italy, and Japan guaranteed that the Greek state would take care of and directly fund its Muslim minorities, just as the sultanate would do the same for its Christians. The League of Nations official Julius Larsen of Østfold was single-handedly instrumental in convincing the League of Nations to deny the request of a population exchange proposed by Greece's liberal prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos. His passionate plea to not uproot the lives of non-combatant innocents and exile them to a foreign land in the name of preventing future conflict and compilation of whole binders full of facts and statistics earned him a place in world history. Under the auspices of the League, Larsen solicited aid from around the Western World to clothe, feed, and teach the religious minorities of both country new life-skills. Since Larsen's aid ship sailed from Båhuslen in 1920 that pulled into Piraeus and Smyrna harbors, only Greece has upheld its end of the bargain. To date, since 1923, only one new church has been built in the entirety of Turkey. From a cultural perspective, the only thing that separates the Muslim Vlasi (Megleno-Romanians) from the Christian majority is that they use the Perso-Arabic script for Greek and for the few times that Megleno-Romanian is ever written down (it's mostly just an oral language). While Nânti has a church, the "Muslims" of town attend church, celebrate all Christian holidays, and request two funerals for their loved ones (first a funeral according to Islamic tradition and burial in the Muslim cemetery of town, and then an Orthodox priest reads the funeral service at the local church and every 40 days, three months, and then finally annually offers a memorial service for the dead [parastas/μνημόσυνον]). It should be noted that in the 17th or 18th Century, not even everyone in Nânti converted, although the vast majority did. Nânti is truly an anomaly in the history of not only the Vlach peoples but in the entire Balkans. There are exactly 11,768 Muslim Vlachs in Nânti and the adjoining area. There are also an additional 1,184 speakers of Megleno-Romanian in Turkey. Those 1,184 Megleno-Vlachs in modern day Turkey are the descendants of a few hundred who heeded the call of the sultan during the Turkish Civil War (coming soon). For their loyalty, they were settled in the village of Göçe in Şile. The local Turks call them "Karacaovalılar" because the Turks called the area where they were from in Macedonia, Moglena (Μογλενά), "the Black Valley" (Karacova/Καρατζόβα[ς]). The Karacaovalılar (Καρατζοβαλήδες) οutnumber the 747 Turks of the village considerably and only in the past 2-3 decades began intermarrying with them and adopting the Turkish language for public use (but not home/private usage). Although there is pressure for all Muslims to give up their ancestral tongues and only speak Turkish, Göçe is so rural and out of the way that the state has no ability to enforce the prevailing, frankensteinish orthodoxy of Turkish nationalism blended with dour Sunnism on the people of Şile.