Islam in Bulgaria
religion in Bulgaria
Islam in Bulgaria is a minority religion and the second largest religion in the country after Christianity. According to the 2021 Census, the total number of Muslims in Bulgaria stood at 638,708 corresponding to 9.8% of the population. Ethnically, Muslims in Bulgaria are Turks, Bulgarians, Roma, and Tatars living mainly in parts of northeastern Bulgaria (mainly in Razgrad, Targovishte, Shumen and Silistra Provinces) and in the Rhodope Mountains (mainly in Kardzhali Province and Smolyan Province).
History
Contact with Islam prior to the Ottoman conquest
The first documented Bulgarian contact with the Muslim world was in the early 700s, when Khan Tervel of Bulgaria helped the Byzantines break the Arab siege of Constantinople, after his army reportedly slaid some 22,000 enemy soldiers. Two centuries afterwards, enmity turned into mutual collaboration, as Bulgaria under Tsar Simeon I and the Arabs coordinated their attacks on the Byzantine Empire multiple times. During the same period, Bulgarian art started exhibiting some Islamic influence, probably mediated by the Byzantines.
Later on, in the mid 1200s, a group of Seljuk Turks is thought to have settled in North Dobruja. According to Ibn Battuta and Evliya Çelebi, the Turkomans colonised the Black Sea coast between the Bulgarian border and Babadag further north. Eventually, part of them returned to Anatolia, while the rest adopted Christianity and are thought to be probable ancestors of the modern Gagauz. However, there is debate whether this settlement ever really happened, as some scholars believe it to have the characteristics of a folk legend.
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This entry incorporates text from “Islam in Bulgaria” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.