The Pomaks
The Islamic presence in Thrace dates as far back as the early 7th century. For it was from this period that the armies of the Ummayad Caliphate were camped in Eastern Thrace during their long but ultimately failed attempt to capture Constantinople, the then-formidable capital of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). From 674-677, the Arabs even established a settlement, Cyzikos, just south of the Roman capital. Ever since that time, Muslims were known to the Bulgars, themselves only recently settled in Thrace. And ever since that time, according to Pomak scholars today, small numbers of Bulgarians have been embracing Islam upon contact with pious Muslims.
During the beginning of the 10th century, when the Volga Bulgars were converting en masse to Islam, the leader of their kindred Bulgars in the Balkans, Tsar Simeon (893-927), was also attempting to secure an alliance with the Arab-led Islamic world against a common Imperial Christian foe. Simeon was seeking to loan Muslim fleets in a bold attempt to capture the seat of the Roman Empire for himself. However, the Byzantines were wise to the Bulgarian plan and successfully thwarted Simeon’s ambitions. Ironically, that same century saw the Byzantines themselves employ Muslim loan troops. However, this time the Islamic army-for-hire comprised not Arabs, but ‘Konyar Turks’. The Byzantines stationed their Muslim mercanary army in Western Thrace, the Rhodopes and Vardar and Pirin Macedonia – precisely were Pomaks are found today – to prevent Slavic and Latin domination of these regions. By the 13th century, as a result of peaceful missionary activity from the Muslim troops, Islam had become firmly established amongst the Rhodope and Macedonian Slavs.
Thus, a large part of Thrace had been peacefully won over to Islam even before the Ottoman conquest. In contrast, the earlier experience of the Bulgarians with Christianity was a far more brutal one: the Bulgarian Court became Christian only after most of the nation’s noblility were butchered by King Boris.
When the Ottomans did begin their conquest of Macedonia and Bulgaria in the 1300s, the descendants of the Bulgarian Muslim converts aided their co-religionists greatly by serving as vanguards, rearguards, auxiliary troops and reconnaissance units for the main Ottoman forces. Hence, Christian Bulgars named their Muslim counterparts “Pomagach” (supporter/helper) from whence the term was shortened to ‘Pomak’.
It is worth noting that official Greek anthropology holds that the Pomaks, who can also be found in the provinces of Xanthi and Rhodope in Greece, are directly descended from the Agrians, an ancient Thracian tribe which was known to inhabit the Rhodope region. The Thracians, along with their racially akin Illyrians and Dacians, were the original inhabitants of the Balkans before the great Bulgar and Slav migrations.
According to the Thracian hypothesis, the Agrians were in turn Hellenised, Latinised, Slavicised, Christianised and finally Islamised. This hypothesis is usually dismissed in academic circles outside Greece in favour of the more universally accepted view that the Pomaks are no more than an old Bulgarian people distinguished by their Islamic faith and their preservation of early Bulgar language and culture. However, the two theories are not mutually exclusive.
The isolation that the Rhodope mountains affords is given by Bulgarian anthropologists as the main factor explaining the unique purity of the Pomak dialect (Greek: Poμ•koi) and culture. But it is for precisely the same reason – geographically-enforced solitude – that it is also equally plausable that mountain-ranging Thracians survived as a racial unit before they mixed with the early Bulgar tribes that settled in the Balkan peninsula after the fall of Rome.
source
http://europeans.ws/
