Turco-Albanian

Turco-Albanian (Τουρκαλβανοί, Tourk-alvanoi) is an ethnographic, religious, and derogatory term used by Arvanites for Muslim Albanians from 1715 and thereafter. In a broader sense, the term included both Muslim Albanian and Turkish political and military elites of the Ottoman administration in the Balkans. The term is derived from an identification of Muslims with Ottomans and/or Turks, due to the Ottoman Empire's administrative millet system of classifying peoples according to religion, where the Muslim millet played the leading role. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the term Turk and from the late nineteenth century onwards, the derivative term Turco-Albanian has been used as a pejorative term, phrase and or expression for Muslim Albanian individuals and communities. The term has also been noted to be unclear, ideologically and sentimentally charged, and an imperialist and racialist expression. Albanians have expressed derision and disassociation toward the terms Turk and its derivative form Turco-Albanian regarding the usage of those terms in reference to them. It has been reported that at the end of the 20th century some Christian Albanians still used the term "Turk" to refer to Muslim Albanians.

Etymology and usage of the term
The term Turco-Albanian is a compound made up of the words Turk and Albanian. The word Albanian was and still is a term used as an ethnonym. Lloshi. Albanian. 1999. p. 277. "The Albanians of today call themselves shqiptarë, their country Shqipëri, and their language shqipe. These terms came into use between the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries. Foreigners call them albanesi (Italian), Albaner (German), Albanians (English), Alvanos (Greek), and Arbanasi (old Serbian), the country Albania, Albanie, Albanien, Alvania, and Albanija, and the language Albanese, Albanisch, Albanian, Alvaniki, and Arbanashki respectively. All these words are derived from the name Albanoi of an Illyrian tribe and their center Albanopolis, noted by the astronomer of Alexandria, Ptolemy, in the 2nd century AD. Alban could be a plural of alb- arb-, denoting the inhabitants of the plains (ÇABEJ 1976). The name passed over the boundaries of the Illyrian tribe in central Albania, and was generalised for all the Albanians. They called themselves arbënesh, arbëresh, the country Arbëni, Arbëri, and the language arbëneshe, arbëreshe. In the foreign languages, the Middle Ages denominations of these names survived, but for the Albanians they were substituted by shqiptarë, Shqipëri and shqipe. The primary root is the adverb shqip, meaning “clearly, intelligibly”. There is a very close semantic parallel to this in the German noun Deutsche, “the Germans” and “the German language” (Lloshi 1984) Shqip spread out from the north to the south, and Shqipni/Shqipëri is probably a collective noun, following the common pattern of Arbëni, Arbëri. The change happened after the Ottoman conquest because of the conflict in the whole line of the political, social, economic, religious, and cultural spheres with a totally alien world of the Oriental type. A new and more generalised ethnic and linguistic consciousness of all these people responded to this.” Whereas the word Turk was viewed at times by Western Europeans or by non Muslim Balkan peoples as being synonymous with Muslim. A study of a collection of Albanian folk songs, published in 1870s by Thimi Mitko, suggests that most Albanian speakers of his time identified themselves and each other through various terms and not a single national designation. Among other terms, Muslims were identified as turq or turkollarë ("Turks").

Apart from being associated with Muslim Albanians, in some specific works the term Turco-Albanian was used to mention the Labs (Liapides), a socio-cultural and dialectal Albanian subdivision, some of whom had converted to Islam during the Ottoman Empire era.

In a broader sense the term Turco-Albanian was used to denote Ottoman military units and elites of both Turkish and Albanian ethnicity that represented the Ottoman administration of the Balkans. Within the Ottoman Empire, Muslim Albanians were closely part of the administrative structures of the state and considered one of its important peoples.

Reference to Muslim Albanian communities as Turco-Albanian is made for those that settled the Peloponnese in order to spread Islam from c. 1715 until after 1770, as part of official Ottoman policy. Later in 1770, Muslim Albanian mercenaries referred to as Turco-Albanian were employed by the Ottoman Sultan to suppress the Greek uprising. Their activity included massacres, looting and destruction in the regions of Epirus, Western Macedonia, Central Greece, Thessaly, Peloponnese suffered most destruction and massacre due to the activity of 15,000 Muslim Albanian mercenaries. In 1779 the Ottoman army finally managed to drive those groups out of Peloponnese, while the remaining ones were either killed by local villagers or found refuge in Muslim Albanian communities in Lala and Vardounia. The period of 1770–1779 is generally termed as Alvanokratia (Albanian rule) in Greek historiography. As a result, local Greek traditions in Epirus since the late 18th century mention frequent raids and looting by "Turko-Albanians" or "Albanian" bands. This kind of activity was connected with the depopulation of settlements.

Later, during the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830) reference to Turco-Albanians is made for those Muslim Albanians that fought in the Ottoman side against the Greek revolutionaries. Most scholars of the Greek Revolution tend to grossly neglect the role played by Albanians in this historical period, in particular treating on the one hand Muslim Albanians as "Turks" either by calling them "Turco-Albanians" (Greek: Τουρκαλβανοί) or entirely ignoring their Albanian identity, and on the other hand Christian Albanians as "Greeks", hence oversimplifying the events to a "tug-of-war between two ostensible sides". But the reality was much more complex, involving power struggles of numerous players with continual power redistributions and interests realignments.

Muslims Albanians are thus often pejoratively named and or called by Greeks as "Turks", represented in the expression "Turkalvanoi". As with the term "Turk", the expression (rendered also as Turco-Albanian) was employed by some writers mainly in nineteenth and early twentieth century Western European literature regarding Muslim Albanian populations. As such, the word Turk within its usage also attained derogatory and derisive meanings that when applied to other words created pejorative meanings of cruel and inhumane behavior and or of being backward and savage. Within a Balkans context during the twentieth century, the usage of the word "Turk" (and "Turkey") has also been politically employed to differentiate the "indigenous" from the "alien" that interpreted Balkan Muslims as "foreigners".Blumi, Isa (2013). Ottoman refugees, 1878-1939: migration in a post-imperial world. A&C Black. pp. 149–150. “It all started with war. War was the means by which new political elites in neighboring, former Ottoman territories like Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia identified an opportunity to rewrite the demographic landscape and in turn, claim a historical association with newly “ethnically cleansed” territories. As a consequence of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, in particular, entire city neighborhoods were razed, names of villages changed, their inhabitants expelled, or more dramatically still, collectively “converted.” To many, the problem was that the beginning of World War I left these states not enough time to complete the ugly task of erasing the Ottoman Empire from “Christendom.” As in the Americas, an Ottoman human “refuse” lingered in independent Balkan countries where some of these “left-over” communities survive until today. Despite a long period of imposed socialism and declarations of brotherhood, Balkan Muslims lived in constant fear that one more round of “ethnic cleansing” will come sweeping through their communities. This is especially the case in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia, where a century now of living as “minorities” often led to opportunistic, “functional” blood-letting campaigns in the larger contexts of “national” politics. In Yugoslavia, the non-Slav Albanian Muslim (and Catholic) evolved into a bureaucratic category especially susceptible to periodic state-led expulsion campaigns—throughout the 1920s, 1935–8, 1953–67, and then again in the 1990s—that passed through the region. Invariably castigated as “outsiders” and “fifth-column” threats to national security, the labeling of entire regions of Kosovo, Novipazaar, Montenegro, and Macedonia as inhabited by generic “Muslim Albanians” often meant the organized expulsion of those communities. In order to justify such measures to an occasional outside traveler bearing witness to the violent process, or delegations sent by the newly created League of Nations at the request of Albania (a member state), the Serbian/ Yugoslav state often rolled out historians, demographers, and anthropologists. In an often repeated exercise throughout the post-Ottoman Balkans, operatives of “ethnic cleansing” campaigns resurrected the “professional knowledge” of race sciences first developed in the United States at the turn-of-the-century. In the 1920s, for instance, state authorities eager to continue a process of expulsion started in 1912—briefly disrupted by World War I—sent an army of European-trained ethnographers to “Southern Serbia” to identify those communities least likely to ever accept Serbian rule. These ethnographers and human geographers adopted many of the same racist epistemologies identified in other Euro-American contexts to identify and catalogue the “sub-human” characteristics of hybrid “Turks” whose very “nature” made efforts to assimilate them into a modernizing Serbian/South Slav society “scientifically” impossible. While these stories now make up a core aspect of Albanian (and Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian) historical memory vis-à-vis Serbia’s torment, it has usefully been forgotten that the dynamics around such systemic violence was informed by a set of ideological and disciplinary frameworks that, once instrumentalized, as by the CUP after 1910, transformed the way once heterogeneous societies interacted with each other. These same ideological principles based on racial segregation and biological hierarchies influenced the intellectual elite of the early twentieth-century world. They ultimately mobilized a so-called fertility politics to justify why violent state-led colonialization/expulsion in Yugoslavia (and earlier in Greece and Bulgaria) was necessary in order to maintain the long-term demographic balance of society. Forced expulsion, the signing of “population exchange” agreements—popularized as a diplomatic “solution” already in the immediate aftermath of the first Balkan War of 1912—and ultimately colonization were all tactics used in the Balkans, as well as throughout the Euro-American dominated world.” With the case of the Albanians, this at times has resulted in Albanophobia, negative stereotyping, socio-political discrimination and even mass violence. Mertus, Julie (1999). Kosovo: How myths and truths started a war. University of California Press. p. 184–185. “The importance of the Kosovo myth to Serbian politics, as Gale Stokes has observed, “lies not in these actual histories but in its selection by the nationalists as the appropriate symbolic universe of Serbianness. It provides a vocabulary of experiences outside of time.” In 1989, the “great defeat” served as a reminder of Serbian suffering and the need for Serbs to defend even their motherland, Kosovo. Mention of the Ottoman Empire also triggered the image of the evil Turks — shorthand for all Muslims, including Kosovo Albanians (regardless of their religion) and Yugoslav (“Slavic”) Muslims, who were considered to be race traitors for converting to Islam during Ottoman rule. Milošević had long capitalized on the “vocabulary of experiences” created by the myth of Kosovo. For him, the anniversary extravaganza for the Battle of Kosovo was tailor made. He arrived at the ceremony by helicopter in a display of power and took the place of honor on a stage decorated with the emblems of Serbian nationalism — including an enormous Orthodox Cross encircled by four Cyrillic C’s (for the slogan “Only Unity/Harmony Saves the Serbs”). The entire federal leadership was in attendance to hear his warning: “Serbs in their history have never conquered or exploited others. Through two world wars, they liberated themselves and, when they could, they also helped other people to liberate themselves. The Kosovo heroism does not allow us to forget that at one time we were brave and dignified and one of the few who went into battle undefeated. Six centuries later, again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things cannot be excluded yet.” By capitalizing on the greatest myth in Serbian folklore, Milošević pitted Serbs not only against Albanians but also against the other enemy identified by the Kosovo myth: Slavic Muslims. It would be the last time the entire federal leadership would stand on the same stage in unity with Milošević.”

Usage in Greek media and literature
At the beginning of the 1880s the Greek press openly used the term "Turco-Albanian brigands" to incite hate speech and to associate Albanian irredentists with "Turkish anti-Greek propaganda". During the years 1882–1897 some Greek media and publications initiated a campaign to promote friendship and a potential future alliance between Greeks and Albanians. As such they avoided the use of the term Turco-Albanian and pointed to the common features shared by both populations. New mixed terms Greek-Albanians is used instead. The term Turco-Albanian after the Greek War of Independence was also sometimes used in 19th century Greek school text books for Muslim Albanians. Greek nationalist histories still uses the more widely known pejorative term Turco-Albanian instead of Muslim Albanians.

Relative terms
Various Muslim Albanian communities by Greeks were similarly also labelled such as the Turco-Bardouniots (or Τουρκοβαρδουνιώτες, Tourko-Vardouniotes). and Turco-Chams (or Τουρκοτσάμηδες, Tourko-tsamides) In Thesprotia older designations based on religion were used for Albanian Muslim Chams by the local Orthodox population who referred to them as "Turks" (i.e.: Muslims), a term still used in the region by some elderly people. The term Turco-Albanian was also used by both British intelligence and the German army for Muslim Albanian Chams during World War II and it was borrowed from Greek usage. Moreover, in Greek, similar composite ethnographic terms that also reveal the ethnic or religious background of the specific communities have also been used, such as Turco-Cretans (or Τουρκοκρήτες, Tourkokrites), and Turco-Cypriots (or Τουρκοκύπριοι, Tourkokiprioi). Amongst the wider Greek-speaking population, until the interwar period of the twentieth century, the term Arvanitis (plural: Arvanites) was used to describe an Albanian speaker, regardless of their religious affiliations, including Islam. On the other hand, within Greek Epirus, the term Arvanitis is still used for an Albanian speaker, regardless of their citizenship and religion.