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The study offered here in is dedicated to one such conservative Islamic community inherited after the end of the Ottoman period in the Balkans: the Bulgarian speaking Muslims of the province of Western Thrace, currently part of the Hellenic Republic, for whom it is nowadays accepted to be referred to as Pomaks or Ahriyans. Before we continue, we must underscore that the Islamic communities in the Balkans, whose native languages are of the Slavic group, are founded on religious rather than ethnic principles - a fact recognized by all six Balkan countries (Bulgaria, FYROM, Greece, Turkey, Albania and Kosovo) in which there are such communities. The Bulgarian speaking groups in these countries do not perceive themselves as belonging to a greater whole although there is a certain sense of community and kinship between the populations of some regions as it is, for example, in the case of the Pomak communities on both sides of the Bulgarian-Greek border. The Bulgarian speaking Muslims are no exception to other ethnic groups which profess Islam as their faith and first and foremost emphasize their confessional affiliation, and only then - depending on the context - their nationality. This cisrcumstance is explainable by the famous Islamic postulate that "there are no nationalities in the bosom of Islam". In the Ottoman Empire, where Muslims were a priority regardless of their ethnicity, the members of the Bulgarian Muslim group were called "Osmanlis" - a prestigious demonym for the subjects professing the religion of Islam.
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