Turk (term for Muslims)
Turk was a label used by Balkan Christians and others to refer to Muslims in the region, not just ethnic Turks. In the Ottoman Empire many Muslims were ethnic Turks, and Islam was the state religion with Muslims having higher rights than non-Mus Christians and Jews, who lived as dhimmi in separate millets (nations).
The word Turk also came to mean groups that had become Muslim under Ottoman rule, especially Albanian Muslims and Slavic Muslims like the Bosniaks. For Balkan Christians, converting to Islam was seen as Turkification — joining Ottoman rule and the Ottoman way of life.
In South Slavic languages there are insulting terms like poturiti that mean “to Turkify” or “Turk.”
Slavic Muslims mostly followed the Hanafi branch of Sunni Islam. Orthodox Roma in the Balkans called Muslim Roma Xoraxane, a word meaning Muslim/Turk in Romani.
Some scholars describe a view called Christoslavism: the idea that Slavs are Christians by nature and that converting to Islam is a betrayal of Slavic kinship. This made Slavic Muslims feel separate from their wider Slavic groups. In Greece, Greek Muslims were sometimes called tourkalvanoi, meaning “Turk-Albanians,” a pejorative term. All these labels are now seen as slurs.
After World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Muslims were incorporated into the modern Turkish nation.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:30 (CET).