Talk:Cretan Turks

Untitled
Turkish plural forms aren't relevant for an encyclopedic article. Could someone who knows the issue reduce the lead so that it includes only the relevant term(s)?

Peter Isotalo 17:20, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

the Cretan Muslims remained under siege in the four coastal cities and there was considerable ethnic cleansing in the eastern part of the island (Sitia; Estiye for the Turks), which has been well-documented, aside from the Ottoman and other state archives, also by some well-known authors like Henry Noel Brailsford and Pierre Mille (the French Kipling) who were present in the island at the time. Pleas for help from the western powers were consistently ignored and many had to flee to Anatolia

~ I believe that this is an over statement ... "ethnic cleansing", perhaps more than one citation or source should be used in order to justify this term.

--Sarissa 19:16, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Estimates of 19th century population
The article reads:
 * The majority of contemporary estimates calculate the number of Muslim Cretans remaining at the eve of the 20th century at 30,000, 9% of the island's population.

but there are no sources given for these "contemporary estimates". Are there good sources after the 1881 Ottoman census? --Macrakis 20:45, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Conversions
Miskin, you removed the following well-sourced paragraph
 * ...On the other hand, many Cretans converted to Islam—more than in any other part of the Greek world. Various explanations have been given for this, including the disruption of war, the possiblity of receiving a timar (for those who went over to the Ottomans during the war), Latin-Orthodox dissention, avoidance of the head-tax (cizye) on non-Muslims, the increased social mobility of Muslims, and the opportunity that Muslims had of joining the paid militia (which the Cretans also aspired to under Venetian rule).

and reverted to the less complete and less well-sourced:
 * A minority of the population (local Greek notables) converted to Islam, so that the Cretan ruling class would remain Greek-speaking.

Though Glenny is a fine journalist, he is hardly a specialist on 17-18th century Crete; indeed, the full title of the referenced book is The Balkans 1804-1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, that is, it doesn't cover the period just after the Ottoman conquest at all, and Crete is only a small part of his topic. (There is also no page reference given so the reader can look up what his actual words were.) Greene, on the other hand, has worked in the Cretan (Vikeleia Library), Ottoman, and Venetian archives (and many other sources, of course), and is a history professor at Princeton with a joint appointment at the Program in Hellenic Studies. Her book is specifically about the transition from Venetian to Ottoman rule.

You also removed the passages:
 * It is difficult to estimate the proportion which became Muslim, as Ottoman cizye tax records count only Christians: estimates range from 30-50%.
 * By the last Ottoman census, in 1881, Muslims were only 24%, concentrated in the three large towns on the north coast, and in Monofatsi.

which is sourced to a Harvard Ph.D. dissertation (later published in Greece as Ελευθέριος Βενιζέλος 1864-1910 Η διάπλαση ενός εθνικού ηγέτη, Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, 1992). I left in the sentence:
 * The majority of contemporary estimates calculate the number of Muslim Cretans remaining at the eve of the 20th century at 30,000, 9% of the island's population.

and tagged it with since there was no source given for it.

Could you please explain your deletions? Thanks. --Macrakis 22:15, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

PS It appears that Glenny speaks German, Czech, and Serbo-Croat, while Greene reads Greek, Italian, French, Ottoman Turkish and Turkish; Greene's languages seem a lot more useful in writing a history of Crete....
 * Note: To get correct figures, you need to go to the last page of results.

This shows a small (possibly statistically insignificant) preference on the Web in general and a very significant preference in Books and Scholar (probably the most reliable) for "Cretan Muslims" and its variants. (Of course, "Cretan Turks" may also refer to their descendents in Turkey.)

I trust this is useful. --Macrakis 14:02, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Cretan Turks which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 20:18, 21 November 2022 (UTC)