Though this is fairly detailed, I don't know if it's good enough to be a thread of its own, so I am putting it here. I am placing it here because I assume the PoD would need to be before 1900. According to good ol' Wikipedia, by 1821, some
47% of the population of Ottoman Crete had converted to Islam. Over the course of the 19th century and the Greek national struggle, this population of "Cretan Turks" slowly shrunk as, due to multiple rebellions, the Turkish population either fled or were pushed into a handful of heavily fortified cities on the northern coast. Below is an ethnic map of Crete by 1861, though I am unsure of how precise it is or the original source. By the late 19th century, with the Cretan Turks facing severe demographic decline, several spats of sometimes severe intercommunal violence broke out between the Muslim and Christian community on the island. Eventually, the West intervened during a war between the Ottoman Empire and Greece over Crete, establishing a semi-independent Cretan State under
de jure Ottoman suzerainty. By 1881, the Turkish population was only 26%, and by 1900 it had shrunk to merely 11%. These are pretty striking demographic changes. The situation in some ways reminds me of the crisis that would unravel in Cyprus during the Cold War many decades later. As such, I now ask this community, WI the population of the Cretan Turks did not enter its decline or eventually stabilized at around 25% of the insular population and Crete did not join Greece, at least not in 1913? Could Crete end up in a position similar to Cyprus during the Cold War, or could Crete replace Cyprus as a zone of conflict while Cyprus falls firmly into the hands of the Republic of Turkey?
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