Outside Turks locality in Kosovo — making of Kosovar Turks

Abstract

The state of being at home “abroad” began to be experienced by Turkish-speaking communities in Kosovo as early as 1913 as the Ottoman Empire suffered a huge loss in the Balkan Wars. Until the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918 (changed to “the Kingdom of Yugoslavia” in 1929) , the Turkish-speaking community lived under the rule of the Kingdom of Serbia. Their initial reaction to living separate from the “homeland” was to immigrate to Ottoman territories en masse. WWI did not change this pattern much, neither did the establishment of the new kingdom in 1918. The mass immigration of Turkish-speaking communities to Turkey continued until the early 1960s. Nonetheless, those who did not choose to leave remained in Kosovo as a religious minority. The idea of being a religious minority rather than a national one was a promoted and a preferable status at both the...