(Anadolu) Top Turkish officials on Tuesday slammed Greece’s president for mislabeling the Muslim Turkish minority in a region of Greece bordering Turkey as a “Greek Muslim minority.”
“The president of a country said to be the cradle of democracy again called the Muslim Turkish minority a ‘Greek Muslim minority’,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Twitter, saying this mischaracterization comes “despite all the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.”
He added: “Whatever you say, Western Thrace’s Turkish minority has been Turkish for centuries, it will remain Turkish!”
On Sunday, visiting Western Thrace, a Greek region with a large Muslim Turkish population, Prokopis Pavlopoulos claimed that under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the Turks of Western Thrace are only a religious minority, whereas the Orthodox Greeks living in the Turkish metropolis Istanbul are a national minority.
