The British specialist in Balkan minority-studies Hugh Poulton writes: 'The Bulgarian Muslims (i.e. the Pomaks) are a religious minority. They are Slavic Bulgarians who speak Bulgarian as their mother tongue, but whose religion and customs are Islamic.' (Poulton 1994:111)

Read the full text here: http://www-gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/csbsc/ulf/pomak_identities.h tm

It is important to be marked the fact, that THE ONLY DIFFERENCE between the pomak - bulgarians and the other bulgarians is their religion. In the old historical sources are preserved many pieces of information about the time and the methods of the forcible coversion to mohammedanism of these AUTHENTIC BULGARIANS.

The older pomaks call the christian bulgarians "kaur" which comes from Turkish "g�vur" (infidel). In Pomak dialects there is no word for "Bulgarian". So - those people don't have a sense of ethnic, but just religious difference with christian bulgarians.

Pomaks--a term that loosely translates as collaborators- -were the descendants of ethnic Bulgarians who accepted the Islamic faith during Ottoman rule, mostly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1990 about 150,000 Pomaks lived in mountain villages in southern and southwestern Bulgaria. They were chiefly employed in agriculture, forestry, and mining. Because of their relative isolation in the mountains, the Pomaks did not become mixed with the Turks during the turkish rule, and because of that, one big part of them were not assimilated from the turks, and they retained their bulgarian physical features. Because the Ottoman Turks showed little interest in Pomak lands, and because the Pomaks were converted rather late, most of their traditional Bulgarian customs remained intact. Thus, for example, the Pomaks never learned to speak Turkish.

AND MORE(IN ENGLISH):

The covercion to mohammedanism was not only "with sword". The other factor "was the economic pressure and the temptation of privileges and tax reductions received for adopting Islam" - this is one characteristic feature of the Turkish Empire.

Read more here: http://www.coronetbooks.com/books/moha8413.htm

Also read this:

Muslim Bulgarians

Muslim Bulgarians (also Bulgarian Mohammedans, bul:�������-����������; local: Pomak, Ahrian, Poganets, Marvak, Poturnak) are descendants of Christian Bulgarians who were forcibly converted to Islam by the Turks, during the 16th and the 18th century. The word pomak is derived from Bulgarian dialectal pomaka (torture) and pomacen (tortured). Those who accepted Islam voluntarily are called Poturnak, meaning "One who turned into a Turk".

Muslim Bulgarians live mostly in the Rhodopes � the Smolyan region, the Southern part of the Pazardzhik and Kurdzhali regions and the Western part of the Blagoevgrad region in Southern Bulgaria and the Xanthi and Rhodope provinces in Northeastern Greece. They also live in a group of villages in the Lovech region in Northern Bulgaria.

Muslim Bulgarians speak a variety of archaic Bulgarian dialects. Under the influence of mass media and school education, the dialects have been almost completely unified with standard Bulgarian among Muslim Bulgarians living in Bulgaria. As Greece has tended to regard its Muslim minority as only Turkish-speaking and has allowed only education in Turkish, the Muslim Bulgarian community in Greece has become largely bilingual and the mother tongue of some of its members now is Turkish. The spoken language of those members of the community who have preserved the dialect as their mother tongue has been influenced to a large extent by Turkish and Greek and shows many aberrations from formal Bulgarian.

Pomaks in Bulgaria do not represent a homogenous community. Pomaks living in the eastern part of the Rhodopes tend to be non-practising Muslims and usually have Christian names. A large number of them, especially those living in the municipalities of Zlatograd, Nedelino, Krumovgrad, and Kirkovo, converted to Christianity in the 1990s. Pomaks in the western part of the Rhodopes are, on the hand, strongly religious and have preserved the Muslim name system, customs and clothing. Whereas the majority of the Pomak community has identified itself as Bulgarian in the population censuses in 1992 and 2001, a certain minority in the western Rhodopes has opted for Turkish ethnicity although its mother tongue is also Bulgarian. The name �Pomak� is strongly pejorative in Bulgarian and is resented by most members of the community, especially by non-practising Muslims. The name adopted and used instead is Bulgarian Mohammedans (Muslim Bulgarians).

The Muslim Bulgarian community in Greece has been largely Turkified. Since the 1990s Greece has made tentative attempts to promote a separate "Pomak" identity, partly because of the advanced Turkification of the non-Turkish members of its Muslim minority (Muslim Bulgarians and Roma) and partly for fear of the growing percentage of Muslims in Thrace in the past couple of decennia. A Greek-Pomak dictionary has been issued and Muslim Bulgarians have frequently been described by Greek authorities as "an amalgamation of Bulgarians, Greeks and Turks" or even as "Muslim Slavophone Greeks".

There is also a substantial Muslim Bulgarian community in Turkey, estimated at some 120,000 people. These are not recognized by the Turkish government as an ethnic minority and have been largely Turkified. Some of them have Turkish or distinctive "Pomak" self-consciousness.

Source: http://pomaks.biography.ms/

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