- Status
My sister and I having been raised on the importance of our Ulster Protestant heritage by my grandmother, my sister caused a great deal of trouble at her Catholic all girls school for refusing to call it Derry in a history lesson...But -derry is only 5 letters.
But -derry is only 5 letters.
This is the problem with imperialist measurements.
It probably roughly corresponds with the Adrianople Vilayet plus the Constantinople Vilayet.
Ottoman censuses aren't ideal, because they involve a weird combination of nationality and religion which means Bulgarians are underestimated in the Ottoman censuses of the Adrianople Vilayet.
Ottoman census of 1914, Constantinople Vilayet:
Muslims - 560,000
Greeks - 206,000
Armenians - 83,000
Jews - 52,000
Another Wikipedia article suggested that there were 10,000 Bulgarians in Constantinople.
1912 estimated demographics of Adrianople Vilayet according to wikipedia:
Muslim Turks - 250,000
Muslim Bulgarians (Pomaks) - 115,000
Muslim Roma people - 15,000
Orthodox Armenians - 30,000
Orthodox Greeks - 220,000
Orthodox Bulgarians - 370,000
Orthodox Albanians - 3,500
Orthodox Turks - 3,000
There was apparently a ethnic cleansing of Bulgarians in 1913, killing or displacing 200,000 people. This didn't affect all of Thrace, though. And some might have returned ITTL following the establishment British rule in Thrace. So let's only subtract 100,000 from the number of Orthodox Bulgarians to account for this.
Asami said that "the British are low-key trying to encourage British settlement there to dilute the current population and prevent the Thracian state from being obliterated the minute Greece, Bulgaria and the Turks focus their attentions on it.". So let's add 40,000 Britons to the population of Thrace. (random guess)
And apparently "many Turks fled Constantinople in 1918", and the government of Constantinople was now Greek-dominated. Let's assume that there are now twice as many Greeks as there are Turks in Constantinople– thus, only 100,000 Turks remain.
Add all these figures together and we get a total Thracian population of:
430,000 Greeks (29%)
350,000 Turks (23%)
380,000 (Orthodox) Bulgarians (25%)
115,000 Pomaks (8%)
115,000 Armenians (8%)
52,000 Jews (3%)
40,000 British (3%)
22,000 other (1%)
Total population: 1,500,000 people.
In other words, it's pretty ethnically diverse.
But -derry is only 5 letters.
I like 'Stroke City' best. That way, everyone can be
Thanks! I'll just give a few comments:
1) The Pomaks were people who spoke South Slavic dialects similar to standard Bulgarian, and practiced Islam. In OTL, they ended up with a variety of ethnic identities: Pomak, Bulgarian, Turk, etc. See this wikipedia article. It remains to be seen what they end up identifying as ITTL– those who live in British Thrace might end up identifying as "Muslim Thracians" or something like that.
2) Constantinople had about 900,000 residents before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. About 65% of these people were Turks. ITTL, most of the Turks have now fled to Turkey, and according to my calculations, Constantinople now only has about 450,000 people as a result of this flight. There will obviously be a lot of empty houses in Constantinople previously inhabited by Turks– although many of these houses may have been destroyed in the war. My question is, have these houses been reoccupied (whether by Christian refugees from Anatolia, by Britons, or by anyone else), or will Constantinople remain a smaller city of only about 500,000 people for now?
Asami
Banned
The city is being renovated after the war damaged large portions of it. People are coming into the city for varying reasons-- Christian refugees from Anatolia are starting to come into the nation as the Ottoman government is stepping up their authoritarian treatments of some of the Turkish non-Muslims (however few there may be). Many Armenians are returning to Armenia (which is a democratic republic); but there is a growing number of non-Muslims from the Assyria and Iraq; along with Britons.
Strangely, there is a growing group of Austrians and French whom have taken up home in Thrace after the communist revolution in their homelands; they see Thrace as a new opportunity. Some have gone to the US, some to Germany, some to fight for Free France--but growing numbers in Thrace.
I'd say, add another ~20,000 French, ~30,000 Austrians, halve the number of Armenians, and add some Assyrian Christians who decided not to stay in Assyria (somewhere between 9 to 16 thousand)
Make sense. The only surprising thing here is that half of the Armenians left. If they were being persecuted by the British, then I see why they might leave. But if not, then I don't see why so many Armenians would leave the city they'd been living in for centuries. In fact, wouldn't the end of Turkish rule make them more likely to want to stay in Constantinople?
I decided to have another look at the Armenian demographics, and found this wikipedia article, which says that, in 1913, there were 164,000 Armenians in Istanbul, out of a total of 1,125,000 residents of Istanbul. That wikipedia article, strangely, cites a very dodgy Amrenian-genocide-denial website, but the actual statistics (164,000 Armenians in Istanbul) appear to legitimately come from the 1913 Armenian Patriarchate census. This contrasts with the 1914 Ottoman census I mentioned above, which says that Istanbul had 83,000 Armenians out of a total population of 900,000. That's a pretty significant difference, but it does make sense that the Ottoman Empire would underestimate its Armenian population, and the Armenian Patriarchate would overestimate it.
So, we can conclude that there were between 83,000 and 160,000 Armenians in Constantinople. Add the 30,000 Armenians in rural Thrace, and we get a total of between 113,000 and 190,000 Armenians. Let's take the average and say 150,000.
And I don't think many of them would leave for Armenia, maybe only 10,000 or so, leaving a final Armenian population in Thrace of 140,000 (about 10% of the population). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Thrace ended up with five official languages- English, Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, and Armenian.
But if you would prefer that Thrace has a smaller Armenian population, then of course that's fine
Thrace seems like a fascinating place, and rather unique. Hope we can see it prosper and maintain its independence!
(Revised) Thrace demographics 1931.
Greek 441,580
Bulgarian 441,730
Turkish 316,291
Armenian 137,663
Jewish 57,740
British 51,330
Austrian 27,640
French 18,913
Albanian 16,401
Assyrian 11,488
Breton 8,318
Basque 4,118
Catalan 3,118
Japanese 2,276
Where'd you make these graphics? :3
- Status