Bulgarian Turks
Bulgarian Turks (; ) are ethnic Turks from Bulgaria. According to the 2021 census, there were 508,375 Bulgarians of Turkish descent, roughly 8.4% of the population, making them the country's largest ethnic minority. Bulgarian Turks also comprise the largest single population of Turks in the Balkans. They primarily live in the southern province of Kardzhali and the northeastern provinces of Shumen, Silistra, Razgrad and Targovishte. There is also a diaspora outside Bulgaria in countries such as Turkey, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Romania, the most significant of which are the Bulgarian Turks in Turkey. Bulgarian Turks are the descendants of Turkish settlers who entered the region after the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, as well as Bulgarian converts to Islam who became Turkified during the centuries of Ottoman rule. However, it has also been suggested that some Turks living today in Bulgaria may be direct ethnic descendants of earlier medieval Pecheneg, Oghuz, and Cuman Turkic tribes. According to local tradition, following a resettlement policy Karamanid Turks (mainly from the Konya Vilayet, Nevşehir Vilayet and Niğde Vilayet of the Karaman Province) were settled mainly in the Kardzhali area by the sultans Mehmed the Conqueror, Selim and Mahmud II. The Turkish community became an ethnic minority when the Principality of Bulgaria was established after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. This community is of Turkish ethnic consciousness and differs from the majority Bulgarian ethnicity and the rest of the Bulgarian nation by its own language, religion, culture, customs, and traditions. Genetic origins DNA research investigating the three largest population groups in Bulgaria: Bulgarians, Turks and Roma confirms with Y-chromosomal analysis on STR that there are significant differences between the three ethnic groups. The study revealed a high number of population-specific haplotypes, 54 haplotypes among 63 tested Turkish males from the Bulgarian DNA bank and fathers from routine paternity cases born in various geographical regions of Bulgaria. The haplotypes of the Turks from Bulgaria as converted to haplogroups make up the following frequencies: J2 (18%), I2 (13%), E (13%), H (11%), R1a (10%), R1b (8%), I1 (6%), J1 (6%), G (6%), N (5%), Q (3%). A Y-DNA genetic study on Slavic peoples and some of their neighbours published two statistical distributions of distance because of the volume of details studied, based on pairwise FST values, the Turks from Bulgaria are most related to Anatolian Turks, thereafter to Italians, Bulgarians and others]; while according to the RST values, the Turks from Bulgaria are most related to Bulgarians, thereafter to Macedonians, Anatolian Turks, Serbs and the rest, while Balts and North Slavs remain most unrelated according to them both. The study claims that the FST genetic distances reflect interpopulation relationships between the compared populations much better than their stepwise-based analogues, but that at the same time the genetic variation was more profoundly calculated by RST. FST and RST calculate allele (haplotype or microsatellite) frequencies among populations and the distribution of evolutionary distances among alleles. RST is based