Albanians in Turkey: Between Three and Five Million

How many Albanians live in Turkey?

No official count exists. dua.com works with a range of three to five million, the estimate Albanian associations and political leaders use; the surviving evidence on its own supports a population above two million. The distinction matters: language, ancestry, self-identification and citizenship are different statistical universes.

The first two rows measure language, the third ancestry, the fourth self-identification and the fifth foreign citizenship. They cannot be added together. The 2.2-million figure below instead updates one ancestry study in two explicit steps; the three-to-five-million working range is reported separately because no calculation behind it is available.

What the censuses actually counted

Turkey's seven published censuses between 1927 and 1965 asked for the language spoken within the family, not ethnicity. A family that had already switched to Turkish at home was invisible to the measure even if every grandparent came from an Albanian village. That is why the language count cannot be used as an ancestry count.

The chart photographs language shift. Household Albanian fell from 0.160 percent of Turkey's population in 1927 to 0.041 percent in 1965, while Albanian as a second language rose to 40,688. By 1965, roughly three in four recorded speakers no longer used Albanian at home. The corrected 1935 mother-tongue figure is 22,754, not the often-copied 14,496; and the de-duplicated 1965 total is 52,445 speakers, not the 53,520 produced by adding overlapping columns.

The one place you can watch a migration become a community

In 1927, Albanian mother-tongue speakers were 57 percent male, against 48 percent for Turkey as a whole: the profile of a migration in which men arrived first. By 1965 the share had closed to 51 percent, the national average. In one line, the census shows a refugee and labour migration becoming a settled population as women arrived, children were born and households formed.

Why the series stops

Turkey did not stop asking after 1965; it stopped publishing. The 1970, 1975, 1980 and 1985 censuses collected the same language data but supplied it only to state institutions. The question disappeared in 1990. Dündar records the statistical institute's explanation that the margin of error was high, alongside a journalist's account that officials had been prosecuted for separatism over the data. Four census results remain unavailable.

The 1.3 million, and where it really comes from

The famous 1.3 million is routinely called a 2008 National Security Council report. It was neither. Milliyet reported in 2008 that academics at İnönü, Fırat and Erciyes universities had carried out the fieldwork around 2000, allegedly for the Council. The project stopped after its director, Şaban Kuzgun, died in a traffic accident. It had completed 60 of 81 provinces and reached the public only when a CD appeared in the Zirve murder investigation.

The surviving Albanian paragraph says the population had passed 1.3 million, including about 500,000 people with a living Albanian consciousness. No sampling frame, questionnaire or methodology annex survives. The original Bugün report is also gone after the newspaper was seized in 2016. The result is weak evidence — unfinished, unpublished and unaudited — but it remains the only known attempt to count descent on the ground.

This is the basis for saying the surviving evidence supports more than two million. It is an inference, not a newly discovered count. The population-growth step is straightforward; the province adjustment assumes the unstudied provinces resembled the studied ones and is therefore deliberately labelled as the weak link.

The other numbers, and what they are worth

Three to five million is the range used by Albanian associations and politicians, and the working range dua.com uses, on this page and in its worldwide estimate. Albin Kurti told Anadolu Agency in 2019 that around five million live in Turkey; a policy paper prints five to six million. Neither provides a demographic method. The range cannot be verified from the surviving record, but it also cannot be disproved by a state that stopped publishing the relevant census data.

The cautious comparators are lower. TRT World said about one million in 2021. Researcher Bayram Şen proposed 1.5–2 million in 2024 and warned that ethnic estimates for Turkey often add up to more than the country's entire population. Those estimates deserve space beside the 2.2-million model and the five-million claim, because precision would be false.

Two small polling figures do not solve the problem. GENAR recorded only three Albanian respondents in a 2011 sample of 2,240; KONDA grouped Albanians with other Balkan-origin communities. Neither can be expanded into a national population estimate.

The one current official figure — and what it is not

Turkey's address-based register supplies one exact but different number. On 31 December 2025 it counted 1,833 citizens of Albania, 1,571 of Kosovo, 1,619 of North Macedonia and 351 of Montenegro. These are current foreign nationals, not Turkish citizens of Albanian descent.

Albanian-citizen registrations peaked at 3,047 in 2018 and have since fallen by 40 percent. The modern foreign-citizen series therefore cannot explain a descent population formed through older Ottoman and Yugoslav migration waves.

The empire's Albanians

Albanians were not an Ottoman minority living at the edge of the state. For centuries they were soldiers, governors, artisans, labourers and grand viziers inside it. The difficulty is that Ottoman records classified people mainly by religion, office and place, not by modern ethnicity. A birthplace in an Albanian-speaking region is evidence of geography; it is not automatically proof of ancestry.

The names that hold up

Koca Sinan Pasha, born near Delvinë, served five terms as grand vizier between 1580 and 1596 and is explicitly described as Albanian in the Turkish religious foundation's encyclopaedia. Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, born in Rudnik in the Berat sancak, began a dynasty that supplied six grand viziers and helped stabilise the empire in the seventeenth century. Avlonyalı Mehmed Ferid Pasha, from Vlora, was Abdülhamid II's last grand vizier before the 1908 constitutional restoration. Ahmed İzzet Pasha, born at Nasliç near Görice, held the office during the final weeks of the First World War.

Claims that 35, 39 or 49 of all Ottoman grand viziers were Albanian cannot be audited because the lists mix birthplace, family tradition and modern labels. The defensible conclusion is simpler: Albanian-origin statesmen were repeatedly present at the empire's highest level, and several of the best-documented names shaped decisive periods.

Muhammad Ali of Egypt: a contested case

Muhammad Ali Pasha, founder of modern Egypt's ruling dynasty, rose from an Ottoman Albanian regiment sent to Egypt in 1801. Khaled Fahmy's archival biography places his birth in the Albanian town of Zëmblak before his family moved to Kavala; the standard Turkish encyclopaedia instead cites a document by his son saying the family came from Konya. The regiment and his Albanian-speaking military network are certain. His precise family origin is not, so the page leaves the dispute open.

Who worked in Istanbul

An Ottoman guild register from around 1800 identifies migrants from Ioannina, Përmet, Monastir, Vlora, Ohrid, Debar and Korçë throughout the capital's labour force. Its clearest finding is market gardening: migrants from the Albanian-speaking south-west Balkans cultivated much of the food sold along the Golden Horn and Bosphorus. Many Orthodox Albanian speakers were filed simply as “Greek” because religion, not language, determined the official category.

A living trace survives at Vefa Bozacısı, founded in 1876 by a family from Prizren and still run by its descendants. The firm's own history says Prizren rather than Albanian — an important distinction in a mixed city — but the route into Istanbul is the same route followed by thousands of Balkan families.

Arnavutköy: the name that outlived the community

The Bosphorus quarter Arnavutköy means “Albanian village”. Tradition says Mehmed II settled Albanians there in the fifteenth century, although the evidence is thin. By 1912 its 7,482 residents included 5,973 Greek Orthodox people and only 493 Muslims. The name survived after the population behind it became impossible to identify.

Istanbul, where Albania was written down

When Albanian printing and teaching were restricted in the Albanian vilayets, the national movement organised in the Ottoman capital. Its leaders were merchants, writers and civil servants who worked inside the empire while creating the language and institutions of a future Albania.

In December 1877 Abdyl Frashëri chaired the Central Committee for Defending Albanian Rights in Istanbul. Six months later its political programme fed into the League of Prizren. The committee asked Sami Frashëri, Hasan Tahsini, Pashko Vasa and Jani Vreto to settle how Albanian should be written. On 19 March 1879 they approved Sami's mainly Latin, thirty-six-letter alphabet.

That October the Society for the Printing of Albanian Letters was founded under Sami's leadership, bringing Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox members into one organisation. It met on Mercan Slope below the Ottoman War Ministry, beside what is now Istanbul University's Beyazıt gate. The street remains; there is no plaque.

The three Frashëri brothers

Abdyl Frashëri (1839–1892) was the political organiser. An Ottoman deputy and the eldest brother, he helped create the Istanbul committee and became one of the principal leaders of the League of Prizren. Arrested after the League was defeated, he spent his final years in Istanbul. His son Mit'hat later chaired the Congress of Monastir and carried the family's political work into independent Albania.

Naim Frashëri (1846–1900) gave the movement its literary language. He wrote the poetry through which generations learned to imagine Albania, as well as schoolbooks and histories in Albanian. At the same time he worked in the Ottoman Ministry of Public Instruction's inspection and censorship office. A Bektashi, he was buried at the Şahkulu Sultan lodge in Kadıköy; his remains were transferred to Albania in 1937.

Sami Frashëri (1850–1904), known in Turkey as Şemsettin Sami, shaped both languages. He wrote what the Turkish encyclopaedia calls the first original Turkish novel, produced the six-volume Kâmûsü'l-A'lâm encyclopaedia and compiled the first Turkish-to-Turkish dictionary, with roughly 29,000 entries. In Albanian he designed the Istanbul alphabet, led the printing society and wrote grammar and school texts. Albanian scholarship also attributes to him the anonymous 1899 manifesto Shqipëria — ç'ka qenë, ç'është e ç'do të bëhet?; some Turkish scholars have disputed that authorship.

The brothers were not three versions of one figure. Abdyl built the political organisation; Naim made Albanian a literary and educational language; Sami built the linguistic machinery and simultaneously transformed Turkish letters. Together they are the clearest example of why Albanian and Turkish history cannot be separated cleanly.

The wider Istanbul circle

Pashko Vasa, a Catholic from Shkodra and later Ottoman governor of Mount Lebanon, helped choose the alphabet and wrote the poem that declared the religion of Albanians to be Albanianism. Hasan Tahsini, from the Konispol area, became the first head of the institution that grew into Istanbul University. Jani Vreto moved the banned printing operation to Bucharest. In 1889 İbrahim Temo, an Albanian from Struga, became founding member 1/1 of the secret society that developed into the Committee of Union and Progress.

Ismail Qemali, who declared independence in 1912, had already spent more than fifty years in Ottoman service. The national movement was not created outside the empire by strangers to it. It was created largely by Ottoman Albanians who knew its institutions from within.

1908–1912: from saving the empire to leaving it

Albanians helped restore the Ottoman constitution in 1908 and declared independence four years later. That reversal explains why a people once trusted at the centre of the empire became a security category in the Republic that followed.

1908: the revolution Albanians helped make

On 3 July 1908 Resneli Ahmed Niyazi Bey, an Ottoman officer of Albanian origin, raided his army depot at Resne and took two hundred men into the mountains for the restoration of the constitution. In Kosovo, thousands of armed Albanians gathered at Ferizovik and pledged a besa for constitutional government, threatening to march on Istanbul. Their telegram arrived on 21 July. Three days later Abdülhamid II restored parliament.

The episode was full of the empire's contradictions. The sultan sent an Albanian general, Şemsi Pasha, against the rebels; a young officer assassinated him in Manastır. Abdülhamid had appointed Avlonyalı Mehmed Ferid Pasha as grand vizier partly because, as he told him, “you are an Albanian” and Albanians had served the state well. He dismissed Ferid on the eve of the constitutional restoration because that trust had failed to hold the provinces.

The alphabet becomes a political line

The new constitutional regime initially allowed Albanian clubs and schools. The Congress of Monastir in November 1908, chaired by Abdyl Frashëri's son Mit'hat, adopted two Latin alphabets side by side. Within two years the government had changed course. In April 1910 the chief religious authority ruled Latin letters contrary to Islamic law; by December printing Albanian in that script was illegal. Schools closed, presses were seized and the alphabet became the visible test of whether Albanians could remain Ottoman without surrendering a national language.

1912: reform, revolt and independence

On 11 January 1912, deputy Hasan Prishtina warned the Ottoman parliament that he would be among the first to rebel if policy did not change. After the session he met Ismail Qemali at the Pera Palace and then joined a secret gathering near Taksim. The conspiracy against the government was planned in the capital by men who had spent much of their lives serving it.

The revolt took Pristina, Prizren, Peja and, on 14 August, Skopje. Prishtina's Fourteen Points did not formally demand autonomy. They asked for officials who knew local languages and customs, Albanian-language education, military service in Rumelia, roads, amnesty and compensation. George Gawrych judges that they fell short of autonomy; Prishtina later called them decisive steps toward independence. The Porte accepted twelve.

The settlement lasted five weeks. Montenegro declared war on 8 October; Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece followed. Albanian rebel leaders, including Isa Boletini, fought on the Ottoman side against Serbia, but the empire lost the Balkans. Ismail Qemali declared Albania independent at Vlora on 28 November 1912. The same Ottoman political class had moved from demanding reform to founding a state.

How the state category changed

From 1910 officials began recommending that Albanian officers, police and teachers be transferred away from Albanian districts because their loyalty was doubted. During the First World War Albanian settlement was restricted in Istanbul, Edirne, Bursa and other western provinces, with families redirected inland and dispersed. The Republic later placed Albanians in the least-favoured tier of its immigration policy, beside Arabs and Kurds.

Albanians in Anatolia did not respond as one bloc during the Turkish War of Independence. Ryan Gingeras documents Albanian landowners and guerrillas around Bursa and Kirmasti supporting the Nationalists with money, weapons and experienced fighters, while other Albanian bands backed Loyalist or local rivals. Köprülülü Hamdi Bey, described by Gingeras as of Albanian descent, led the Akbaş arms-depot raid for the Nationalists; Yahya Kaptan held the İzmit–Istanbul road and appears at length in Atatürk's Nutuk.

The Frashëri family itself divided along the new border. Abdyl's son Mit'hat went to independent Albania. All four surviving children of Sami Frashëri stayed in Turkey, including Galatasaray founder Ali Sami Yen. The family that helped imagine Albania also became part of the Turkish Republic.

The migration waves: Niš to Skopje, 1878–1968

Most Albanian families in Turkey descend from migrations caused by borders, war and state policy rather than ordinary labour recruitment. The records rarely identify them as Albanian, which is one reason the present population cannot be reconstructed by adding arrival registers.

1878 and the Balkan Wars

Serbia's expansion into the Sanjak of Niš in 1877–78 displaced a large Muslim, predominantly Albanian population. Estimates vary, but tens of thousands moved into Kosovo and some continued to Anatolia, including the Samsun region. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 produced another refugee movement after Ottoman rule disappeared from the Albanian lands; no Albanian-only total survives.

Çamëria and the population exchange

The 1923 Greek–Turkish exchange classified people by religion, making Albanian-speaking Muslims in Greece formally exchangeable. Greece and Albania secured an exemption for the Muslim Chams in 1926, but migration to Turkey continued through an earlier trickle, the Lausanne years and a Greek-supported legal channel from 1932 to 1940. Lambros Baltsiotis documents officials in Filiates and Igoumenitsa encouraging that flow. Turkey's Cham communities therefore descend mostly from families who left before the mass expulsion of 1944–45, which drove people north into Albania.

Mal Berisha later estimated 80,000–100,000 Chams in Turkey, but no count supports the number. His account does preserve one telling detail: some families kept the surname Çam, a Turkish word meaning “pine” that also marked their origin. The page reports the estimate as community testimony rather than measurement.

Who the Republic admitted

The 1934 Settlement Law did not name Albanians, but a Directorate of Settlement circular dated 7 August 1934 did: foreign Albanians, Arabs, Kurds and other non-Turkish-speaking Muslims were to be treated as foreigners rather than immigrants attached to Turkish culture. Earlier policy placed Albanians in the least-favoured naturalisation tier, while Tatars, Pomaks and Bosniaks entered the first. Family reunification remained possible, but open Albanian immigration did not.

A 1938 Turkish–Yugoslav draft convention proposed moving 40,000 Muslim families from southern Yugoslavia to Turkey. It was never ratified. The idea returned in a different form after Ankara and Belgrade reached an understanding in 1953.

The 1950s: leaving as Turks

Yugoslavia permitted its Turkish population to emigrate. Albanian families who wanted to leave needed an invitation from relatives in Turkey, renunciation of Yugoslav citizenship, a fee and a Turkish language-and-culture test administered by Turkish consular officials. The legal category changed the census before anyone boarded a train.

The Albanian share can no longer be separated. A Yugoslav file marked “Turk” and a Turkish immigrant card marked “attached to Turkish culture” can describe the same Albanian family. That administrative transformation is one of the main mechanisms by which evidence of the community disappeared.

Turkey's settlement register counts 172,564 arrivals from all of Yugoslavia between 1952 and 1968. Other archival studies give roughly 170,000–175,000. Noel Malcolm's estimate that about 100,000 were Albanian is plausible, but it is not a measured row in the register.

Most arrivals were self-financed rather than placed in planned villages. They went where relatives had already settled, producing the chain-migration map still visible in Bayrampaşa, Küçükçekmece, Bursa and İzmir. Pressure mattered too: Kosovo's 1955–56 weapons-collection campaign generated thousands of documented complaints of beatings and mistreatment even though Turkish planning documents described the migration as voluntary and economic.

The last refugee movement

During the Kosovo war in 1999, Turkey recorded 17,746 arrivals; about 10,500 more came during the 2001 conflict in Macedonia. They were admitted as guests, often stayed with relatives and mostly returned. This final movement was visible and documented, but far smaller than the earlier migrations that had entered Turkey under another identity.

Where the community lives

Lists of "provinces with significant Albanian populations" circulate widely and almost all of them are copied from an uncited box on Wikipedia, which in turn restates a map a contributor drew in 2014. Two of the twelve provinces on that list — Artvin, on the Georgian border, and Hatay, which only joined Turkey in 1939 — have no supporting settlement history in any scholarly source. One much-copied Istanbul list even misspells Zeytinburnu, which tells you how it travelled. This section uses what can be documented, and says where the documentation runs out.

The only official geography

The last time the Turkish state recorded where Albanian was spoken was 1965, and the province-level figures exist. They were obtained from the statistical institute by a team at Mimar Sinan University, who mapped the mother tongues of Turkey province by province for every census from 1927 to 1965. Their Albanian chapter is the only published map of this community there has ever been.

Two things stand out. Istanbul is the most concentrated province at every single census — in 1927 it alone held 28 per cent of everyone in Turkey who spoke Albanian at home. And the map moves: Niğde, which had a thousand Albanian speakers in 1927, had twenty by 1935; Amasya quintupled in the five years to 1965; Sakarya appears from nothing. The authors of the atlas are careful about what that means, and this page follows them — the shifts are, in their words, hard to tie to any particular policy and look like individual movements rather than engineering.

One caution about a figure that circulates. Albanian was often said to be proportionally highest in Bursa (0.3 per cent), then Sakarya, Tokat and Istanbul (0.2 per cent each). The counts above are the right four provinces in a plausible order — but Amasya's 1,489 in a province of roughly a quarter of a million people would outrank all of them, and Amasya is missing from that list. This page prints the counts and not the percentages, because the 1965 provincial populations needed to compute them properly could not be obtained.

The 1965 pattern shows three clusters, and they are the same three the documentary record shows: the Marmara and Thrace belt, a Samsun–Amasya–Tokat pocket on the Black Sea, and the Aegean around İzmir and Aydın.

Istanbul

Istanbul is the anchor and always has been — about 5,000 Albanian mother-tongue speakers in 1927, and the largest share of every wave since. Within it, the district with the strongest documentation is Bayrampaşa. It houses the Turkish-Albanian Brotherhood association and the Kosovo Cultural Centre, and a 2011 report found it to be the one district where people in their late twenties and thirties still spoke Albanian. A 2019 Marmara University thesis narrowed that further, recording the local muhtarlık's estimate — the muhtarlık keeps no ethnic records — that Albanian-origin families cluster in Bayrampaşa's Vatan, Terazidere and İsmet Paşa neighbourhoods.

The most interesting thing about Istanbul's Albanian map is that it is organised by village of origin, not by nationality. Reporting by Daniel Petrick for Balkan Insight in 2021 found that in Merdivenköy, on the Asian side, almost everyone traces their roots to Kaçanik in Kosovo and its villages, from arrivals in the 1930s and the late 1950s; Bayrampaşa's Albanians are disproportionately from Skopje; Küçükçekmece's from Peja and from Kumanovo in North Macedonia. Zeytinburnu and Gaziosmanpaşa have Albanian-descended populations who have largely stopped speaking the language.

Whereas in the past an entire Istanbul street might be composed of Albanians from a single village, changing urban dynamics, assimilation, marriage with non-Albanians, and the passing on of the older generation has put an end to these dense, Albanian-language spaces.

Daniel Petrick, Balkan Insight, 28 April 2021

Samsun: the best-documented Albanian geography in Turkey

On the Black Sea coast, in Bafra and its neighbouring districts, the record is unusually good because a historian went and read the civil registers.

Two estimates exist for the province and they do not measure the same thing. Şerife Geniş and Kelly Lynne Maynard, whose fieldwork began in 2005, report that "according to the community leaders we interviewed, there are about 30,000–40,000 ethnic Albanian Turkish citizens in Samsun Province" — a figure the community supplied about itself, now twenty years old, and about a population the same authors describe as shrinking through out-migration to Istanbul, İzmir and Bursa. The historian Mehmet Köseoğlu, working from the population registers, puts it at 25,000–30,000 Kosovo migrants in the province, "the majority of them Albanian, with a small number of Turks and even Bosniaks". Ethnicity and birthplace are different questions; merging or averaging the two figures would be a mistake.

Köseoğlu's village-level work is the gold standard here, and it comes with a caveat he states himself: he counted everyone whose registered birthplace was in a Kosovo Vilayet district — Pristina, Gjilan, Mitrovica, Peja, Prizren, Skopje, Vushtrri — which records origin, not ethnicity. His oral-history informants, he notes, were unwilling to discuss ethnicity at all.

What he found across thirty-one villages in Bafra, Ondokuz Mayıs, Alaçam and Kavak is that no village was built for the migrants. Families were parcelled out piecemeal into existing Greek, Turkish and Circassian villages. Two villages are identified as Albanian in his text. Osmanbeyli, near Bafra, was a Greek village called Lodros, emptied by the population exchange and refilled with 89 Kosovar families — 384 people, 241 of them born in Pristina and 64 in Gjilan; "the great majority of the village", he writes, "made up of Albanian-origin Kosovar families". In Çiğdem, in Kavak, three of the four lineages are Albanian, from Gerguri and Budrika, and they were first settled among Ubykh Circassians. The townspeople went to Bafra's İsmet Paşa neighbourhood.

There is an independent confirmation of that geography from a completely different method. A query of OpenStreetMap for every place in Turkey named Arnavut returns four micro-toponyms in Samsun province — and all four sit inside Bafra and Alaçam, the exact districts the registers identify. One of them is a neighbourhood called simply Arnavutlar, "the Albanians", inside the village of Uluağaç, which Köseoğlu counted register by register: nine families, thirty-two people, twenty-five of them born in Pristina. Archival demography and a crowd-sourced map, a century apart, pointing at the same hillside.

The rest of the map

Beyond Istanbul and Samsun the record thins, and this page follows it rather than filling it in.

Thrace and the Marmara. Kırklareli took 34,208 registered exchangees between 1923 and 1929, and 9,396 Bosniaks, Albanians and Turks in 1922–23 alone. Bursa, İzmir, Manisa and Eskişehir are named in the Turkish official literature as the main secondary destinations of the 1950s arrivals, alongside Istanbul's Zeytinburnu and Ümraniye and Ankara's Altındağ. Places locally associated with Albanian-descended communities in the Marmara region — Karacabey, Mustafakemalpaşa, Gemlik, Mudanya, Karamürsel, Kartal — are recorded here as local knowledge, not as a sourced settlement record.

İzmir. The Çamdibi and Altındağ neighbourhoods of Bornova are a documented Balkan-migrant quarter, settled between 1950 and 1960 by families from Rostuša, Skopje, Orizar, Delčevo and other Macedonian towns, with Albanian informants among them.

The eastern outliers. The strangest part of the map is the furthest from the Balkans. TRT World reported in 2021 on communities of Albanian descent present for more than two centuries in Bingöl, Diyarbakır, Doğubayazıt and Hakkari — deep in the Kurdish-majority east, descended from Ottoman officials and soldiers rather than from refugees. The families in Bingöl came from Peja during the Ottoman period and today, the report says, "are now known as the largest Kurdish group", speaking Turkish and Kurdish. In Doğubayazıt, on the Iranian border, ten or fifteen Albanian families remain.

One of them, Divane Özbey, put the situation better than any statistic on this page:

I'm originally Albanian but from which country in the Balkans I come from, I don't know. I don't know how to speak Albanian, but people from the village know that my family and I are Albanian. My grandparents came and settled here approximately 200 years ago as Ottoman soldiers.

Divane Özbey, Doğubayazıt, to TRT World, 2021

Where today's Albanian citizens live

This is a separate map, of a much smaller population, and it is one of the few things about the subject that can be answered exactly. Of the 1,833 citizens of Albania registered as resident in Turkey at the end of 2025, the population register places 951 in Istanbul, 223 in Ankara, 112 in Edirne, 105 in Bursa, 93 in Çanakkale, 68 in Tekirdağ and 51 in İzmir, with smaller numbers in Konya, Sakarya, Eskişehir and Kocaeli.

Edirne is the interesting one. It holds 112 Albanian citizens and 285 Kosovar citizens — more than any city except Istanbul — for a town of 180,000. Edirne is the land border to the Balkans, and it is where Trakya University teaches the only Albanian Language and Literature degree in Turkey.

The language that went

Every diaspora in this series loses language across generations. What happened in Turkey is different in kind: it was near-total, it was fast, and — this is the part that unsettles people — a great many of the families involved describe it as something they chose.

Why it went so completely

Three things, working together. The first is that there was a bargain. Muslim refugees from the Balkans were admitted to Turkey as people "attached to Turkish culture", naturalised immediately on arrival, and given a place in the national story as returning kin rather than as foreigners. The researcher Bayram Şen calls what followed gönüllü bir asimilasyon tercihi — a voluntary assimilation choice — arguing that people who had lost a homeland took ownership of the new one willingly. He describes how the two words sit today: the place the family came from is the vatan, the homeland; Turkey is the anavatan, the motherland.

The second is pressure, which was real but indirect. The 1934 Settlement Law contains no language clause; what existed instead was the "Citizen, speak Turkish!" campaign from 1928, enforced in the street and the municipal office. And the census's own second-language question, Dündar notes, was designed to reveal "the rate at which the various cultures were affecting one another" — which is to say, to measure assimilation as it happened.

The third is the settlement pattern, and it is the one that actually predicts who kept the language. Geniş and Maynard found the rule in Samsun: Balkan Albanian refugees split between those who "ended up in actual Albanian-speaking communities" and those "relocated into villages where they were the only Albanian-speaking migrants", and "the language is retained by some of the descendants from those of the former, but not those of the latter." Nine families in one village kept it. One family in nine villages did not.

Two places outside Samsun have ever been named in print as still Albanian-speaking, and one of them now has proper evidence behind it. Kapıağzı, a village of a couple of hundred people in the Niksar district of Tokat, was named in a 2011 newspaper feature — and again in 2012 by the state news agency, this time with named informants, household counts and the village association's chairman saying in terms that Albanian is still spoken there. Tokat had 964 Albanian mother-tongue speakers at the 1965 census, so the claim sits inside a real provincial figure rather than floating free.

A note on dialect, since the internet asserts one: it is not safe to say Albanians in Turkey speak Tosk. The great twentieth-century waves came from Kosovo and Macedonia, which are Gheg; the Tosk strands — the Ottoman-era trade migration from Ohrid and Korçë, and the Çam component from Epirus — are older and smaller. The single Wikipedia infobox field that puts Turkey in the Tosk column carries no citation and the article's own text does not support it.

Where Albanian is still taught

Standing beside Erdoğan in Tirana in January 2022, Edi Rama announced that "introduction of Albanian as a language of choice throughout Turkish education is now a reality". The policy behind that sentence is real. On 21 October 2016 Turkey's education ministry signed a protocol with Trakya University in Edirne adding Albanian and Bosnian to the "Living Languages and Dialects" elective for middle schools, with the curriculum written by the university's Albanian Language and Literature department.

Its scale is another matter, and the detail is worth the space. The curriculum is real: 288 hours across four school years, mapped to the Common European Framework, written in Edirne. In the first year the course ran, the state news agency reported that Albanian had been chosen by 44 pupils, in two eighth-grade classes, at a single school — the Aliya İzzetbegoviç middle school in Kemalpaşa, İzmir. The first lesson was attended by Turkey's education minister and Albania's.

An EU-funded monitoring team went to that school and interviewed the teacher. The village is Bosniak. Almost everyone in it descends from families who began arriving from Bosnia in the 1850s, and — the teacher's own words — there is not one person in the village who knows Albanian, and the teacher did not know Albanian either. The first lessons were given by a mathematics teacher; when he moved, the job went to a paid hire from a press-and-broadcasting department who knew Bosnian from his family. No Albanian subject teacher has ever been appointed. The families want Bosnian, which is what the village actually speaks, so the school keeps the Albanian class viable by putting every seventh-grader through a year of it. Asked what he told pupils who wondered why they were learning Albanian, the teacher said he told them a letter had come from the ministry.

The elective remains on the ministry's published list, carried through into the 2025 curriculum reform. Whether a single Albanian class ran anywhere in Turkey in 2025–26 is not something the ministry publishes, and this page does not claim it.

The whole institutional footprint of the Albanian language in Turkey fits in a short list: one university department at Trakya, one school elective in İzmir, evening classes at the Kosovo Cultural Centre in Bayrampaşa, classes at Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul, and a handful of association courses — Merdivenköy's, opened around 2018 and taught by an actor from Kosovo living in Istanbul, and weekend courses run with the Turgutlu Albanian culture association in Manisa.

The classroom in Bayrampaşa

The Kosovo Ministry of Diaspora's first cultural centre anywhere in the world opened in Bayrampaşa on 23 February 2013. Its director, and by Balkan Insight's account its sole employee, is Kamil Bitiş, and he teaches Albanian free, every night.

He was born Kamil Bytyqi in 1959, in the village of Sllovi in the Lipjan district of Kosovo, where Serbian officials had written the family name Bitiç. When his grandfather moved sixteen family members to Istanbul in 1964, the family was required to Turkify the name. Where others chose Öztürk — "core Turk" — his grandfather picked a Turkish word that would still sound like the Albanian one. Bytyqi became Bitiş.

The grandfather's own father and uncle had been killed by the Serbian army in 1912. In mid-April 1999, Serbian police and paramilitaries burned Sllovi and killed upwards of thirty-five people; of sixteen bodies later exhumed at the Batajnica military base outside Belgrade, three were named Bytyqi.

Bitiş dates the rise in demand for Albanian classes to after 1999. Before the war, visiting Kosovo was dangerous and the language had little practical use; afterwards people started going back, and needed it. What turns up in his classroom is not what anyone would design:

We have every age and language ability in our classes. For example, in last night's class we had an elementary school student and a 77-year-old retired dentist who was born in Tetovo. We have 17-year-olds and 73-year-olds — people of every age. Some students know Albanian but their vocabulary is very small. Maybe they spoke Albanian as children but now only know 500 words, or only know words related to food or religion.

Kamil Bitiş, Kosovo Cultural Centre, Bayrampaşa, to Balkan Insight, 2021

His wife is Albanian and his children speak Albanian. All of them married non-Albanian Turks. He calls the outcome natural and almost inevitable, and he still opens the classroom:

That means my grandchildren are Albanian kids who don't speak Albanian, and they probably won't ever know it.

Kamil Bitiş, to Balkan Insight, 2021

In October 2020 the Kosovar singer Shyhrete Behluli shot a bilingual ballad called Jam Shqiptar / Ben Arnavutum — "I am Albanian" — on a Bayrampaşa street corner, at a monument assembled from Albanian, Bosniak and Turkish national symbols. Her duet partner was the Turkish pop star Sinan Akçıl, who was born in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands to Albanian parents: a man from the western European diaspora, singing in Turkish, in an Istanbul Albanian neighbourhood. Her verses recall the three waves. The line Balkan Insight translates is the one everybody quotes: I'm Albanian but I can't speak Albanian — it is in my heart but not on my tongue.

Language classes reveal something that population statistics cannot: Albanian identity in Turkey is not simply disappearing. For some descendants, it is being consciously rediscovered. They may no longer inherit Albanian automatically through the household, but they can choose to seek out the language, the places and the people connected to it.

Faith, food and four words

When a language disappears from a community, what survives is usually vocabulary in someone else's mouth. Turkish has kept more of the Albanian presence than the Albanians of Turkey have — and, unusually, the residue can be dated. The Albanian idioms in Turkish come from the old Ottoman labour migration, not from the twentieth-century refugees. By the time the muhacir waves arrived, the words were already fossils.

The word itself is old. Nişanyan's etymological dictionary records arvanid attested in Turkish before 1400 and arnavud before 1600, from the Greek arvanítis.

Four words in the national dictionary

The Türk Dil Kurumu's dictionary of contemporary Turkish — the state language authority — lists exactly four compound headwords built on Arnavut:

A liver dish, a cobblestone, a chilli and a roof window: four entries in the national dictionary of a country that does not count the people whose name they carry.

Arnavut ciğeri has the best chain of evidence. Evliya Çelebi, describing the great guild procession staged in Istanbul in 1638, records that the ciğerciler — the liver-sellers — were Albanians from Ohrid, Korçë and Hrupishta, who strung fresh liver, heart, kidney and spleen on skewers and hawked them through the streets. The dish is widely said to have fifteenth-century origins; that claim traces to a municipal culture magazine of 2012 and has no chain of custody behind it. The safe and sufficient statement is that the trade is attested in Istanbul by the mid-seventeenth century, it was Albanian, and the name stuck.

Arnavut kaldırımı is honestly contested, and the honesty is the interesting part. The dictionary defines it with no ethnic explanation at all. Milliyet, running an explainer in 2022, conceded the point outright: "there is no exact reason why this type of pavement is called Albanian pavement", before offering the paviour story as a probable cause. A competing account traces it to the volcanic stone streets of Gjirokastra; the Turkish Wikipedia article carrying that version flags it as uncited. Two unevidenced explanations do not add up to one evidenced one. There is a nice reciprocity in it, though: modern Albanian's own word for cobblestone, kalldrëm, is a Turkish loanword. The two languages traded the thing and the word in opposite directions.

And a negative finding worth printing: the Turkish language authority's proverb and idiom database contains no entry of any kind containing the word Arnavut. "Albanian stubbornness" — Arnavut inadı — is said constantly in Turkey and codified nowhere.

The Albanian of the shadow theatre

The best-documented portrait of how Ottoman Istanbul saw Albanians is not in an archive; it is a puppet. In classical Karagöz shadow theatre the Arnavut is one of the fixed types, appearing as Mestan Ağa, Celo Ağa, Şaban Ağa and others, and working as a gardener, a liver-seller, a livestock dealer, a watchman or a boza-seller — the same five trades the guild registers put Albanians in.

His character, in the standard Turkish description, is "honest and manly but ignorant and coarse. Quick to anger, impetuous; he swaggers, but runs when things get hard; treated well, he is agreeable", and he speaks with "his own accent, an Albanian mouth". Brave, loyal, hot-headed, stubborn, unlettered, and holding down five specific jobs. Four centuries later the affectionate stereotype in Turkey is recognisably the same puppet.

Faith, and the Bektashi thread

The overwhelming majority of Albanians who came to Turkey were Sunni Muslims, and the religious identity that admitted them to the country is the one that dissolved them into it. But there is a second thread, and it runs both ways between the two countries.

The Bektashi order — heterodox, dervish, historically bound up with the Janissaries — has the deepest Albanian connection of any Sufi order, and its world headquarters has been in Tirana since the Turkish Republic banned the dervish lodges in 1925. Naim Frashëri, the national poet of Albania, was a Bektashi, wrote a Bektashi devotional book, and was buried at the Şahkulu Sultan lodge at Merdivenköy in Kadıköy — the same Istanbul neighbourhood where, a century later, Albanians from Kaçanik would settle and open a language school. The order was suppressed twice, in 1826 and again in 1925, and the second suppression is why the centre of Albanian Bektashism is in Albania rather than in Turkey.

What actually survived

Asked what remains, Bayram Şen's answer is precise and unromantic. There is no Albanian restaurant scene in Turkey. What there is: Arnavut ciğeri and Elbasan tava on ordinary Turkish menus, particular börek traditions, a particular paça, particular Ramadan dishes, and wedding and funeral customs that persist inside families. After 1999 a "Rumeli music" scene emerged, and associations began inviting performers from Kosovo, Albania and North Macedonia.

What a wedding in Bursa still looks like

The one part of this culture that has been properly recorded is the one that belongs to women. In 2025 a folklore student at Bursa Uludağ University, Ayşenur Tanık, submitted a thesis on the rites of passage of the Albanians of Bursa, built from fifty-five informants — forty-six of them women, aged twenty-six to seventy-six — and from attending the events themselves: weddings, henna nights, the petla day, the birth customs. It is the only ethnography of this community's family life that exists.

What it records is a wedding cycle that has kept its Albanian vocabulary inside Turkish sentences. The asking is fjalën me mar, the engagement fejesë, the trousseau prika, the bride nuse and the groom dhëndër, the wedding itself dasmë. There is a kolaç night and a şalvar night and a henna night; there is a paça day after. One of her informants, a woman of seventy-four born in Gjilan in Kosovo and living in the Davutdede quarter of Bursa, describes the Friday:

Friday was şalvar night. All the brides wore şalvar. They'd take one off and put another on, different ones. They danced the valle on şalvar night.

Informant, b. Gjilan 1951, in Ayşenur Tanık's fieldwork, Bursa Uludağ University, 2025

The valle — the Albanian chain dance — is still danced at Albanian weddings in Turkey, and this page can say so because somebody went and watched. It is a folklore compilation rather than a critical sociology, and it records what its informants say the tradition is; taken as testimony, which is what it is, it is the richest single document about Albanian family life in Turkey.

Rumelian, not Albanian

The clearest evidence about identity in Turkey is not a survey. It is a membership list.

The Rumeli Balkan Federation of Associations publishes its roll: sixty-one member associations, four branches and thirteen overseas offices. Of those, exactly one carries the word Arnavut in its name — the Çevretepe Village Albanians' Culture and Solidarity Association. Every other member is named for a place (Kosova, Üsküp, Gostivar, Kırçova, Priştine, İpek) or for "Rumeli" and "Balkan" as categories. The other big federation, founded in 1998, describes its constituency as Rumeli Türkleri — the Turks of Rumelia — and lists Albania among the countries where those Turks live.

Being from Pristina, Skopje or Gostivar is a geographical fact, not an ethnic one, and this page does not present those bodies as Albanian associations. What the roll establishes is the shape of the available identity: the organised civil-society label on offer to a Balkan-origin family in Turkey is Rumelian, or muhacir. The Albanian label survives at the level of a single village association.

Şen describes the same thing from the inside: "the word Albanian isn't much used as a personal preference; many people just say I'm Rumelian and leave it there." When the claim is made, he says, it comes out tangled — Ben Türkiyeli Arnavutum, "I'm an Albanian of Turkey"; Arnavut Türküyüm, "I'm an Albanian Turk".

Explicitly Albanian organisations do exist. The Turkish-Albanian Brotherhood association, based in Bayrampaşa with branches in Küçükçekmece, Ankara and Bursa, runs folklore festivals, language classes and 28 November independence-day commemorations; a copy of its statutes dated 1952 survives in the Turkish antiquarian book trade, which is decent evidence for how far back it goes. There is, as far as this page could establish, no umbrella federation of Albanian associations in Turkey at all.

One question worth answering, because civil society in Turkey has had a hard decade. In July 2016, after the attempted coup, a single emergency decree closed more than eleven hundred associations overnight. Not one of them was an Albanian, Rumelian, Kosovar or Macedonian community association. Four had "Balkan" in the name, and reading them in context they are plainly Gülen-movement outreach bodies — businessmen's clubs and "academic cooperation" associations of the kind the movement ran in every region — rather than hemşehri societies. Later decrees closed further associations and their lists have not been checked here, so this is a finding about July 2016 rather than about the whole period.

The people

Lists of "famous Turks of Albanian descent" are among the least reliable documents on the internet. Turkey keeps no register of ethnicity, so there is nothing behind them but each other: a Wikipedia category with a hundred names, roughly a third of which have no supporting sentence anywhere in their own biography, copied onward by clickbait sites in three languages until repetition looks like evidence.

This page uses one rule, the same one applied to the sister pages in this series. A person appears here if they have said it themselves in a named outlet, or if a serious reference work or scholarly source states it. Everyone rejected under that rule is named too, at the end, because the rejections are as useful as the entries.

The line that runs through Turkish public life

Start with the family already met on this page. Sami Frashëri gave Turkish its first novel, its first encyclopaedia and its first dictionary, and gave Albanian its alphabet. His second son was born Ali Sami Frashëri in Üsküdar in 1886, took the surname Yen under the 1934 Surname Law, and in October 1905, with a group of schoolfriends at Galatasaray High School, founded Galatasaray Sports Club. He led the Turkish Olympic Committee from 1926 to 1931 and coached Turkey's national team in its first international. The stadium bore his name from 1964 to 2011 and the club's training complex still does. He is buried in Feriköy Cemetery, where his father's remains were moved in 1968.

The man who wrote the words Turkish children sing at school assembly every week was the son of an Albanian. Mehmet Âkif Ersoy wrote the İstiklâl Marşı, the Turkish national anthem, adopted in 1921. The Turkish religious foundation's encyclopaedia records that his father, İpekli Mehmed Tâhir Efendi, came to Istanbul as a boy from the village of Shushicë in the district of İpek — Peja, in Kosovo — and became a teacher at the Fatih medrese. The state news agency describes him in the same terms. Âkif was an Ottoman Islamist and never claimed a separate Albanian identity; the accurate phrase is "of Albanian paternal descent", and it is enough.

Between them those two facts do something no argument can. Turkey's most internationally recognised football club and Turkey's national anthem both come from this community, and hardly anyone in either country thinks of them that way.

The Republic

Abidin Dino (1913–1993), one of the major Turkish painters of the twentieth century, came from the Dino family of Preveza in Çamëria — among the leading Albanian notable families of the town. He was named after his grandfather, Abidin Pasha Dino, who signed the 1878 memorandum to Bismarck and Andrássy, was the League of Prizren's chief representative for Epirus, and served three months as Ottoman foreign minister in 1880. His father Rasih Dino was a diplomat who worked with Ismail Qemali and the Vlora government. The Turkish encyclopaedia's short 1988 entry on the grandfather gives Preveza as a birthplace and does not discuss ancestry; the family's Albanian role is documented by Stavro Skendi and George Gawrych.

Elyesa Bazna, an ethnic Albanian born in Pristina, was valet to the British ambassador in Ankara during the Second World War. From 1943 he photographed documents from the ambassador's safe and sold them to German intelligence under the codename Cicero — one of the most consequential espionage operations of the war, and one of the most farcical, since the Germans paid him largely in counterfeit banknotes.

Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda, born at Ioannina in 1881, was the longest-serving speaker of the Turkish parliament and acted as head of state for a day after Atatürk's death. Ryan Gingeras describes him as a bureaucrat of Albanian descent and records that as governor of İzmir he was accused of favouring Albanian refugees out of fellow-feeling. Against that, a 1903 family genealogy claims the family were timar-holders from Çankırı. The case is genuinely open and is given here as open.

Was Atatürk Albanian?

The suggestion that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had Albanian ancestry is real, but it is not proven. Several Western writers and biographers have described his father, Ali Rıza Efendi, as possibly Albanian or Slavic in origin. Andrew Mango's biography treats the family as Muslim, Turkish-speaking and rooted in Ottoman Macedonia, while concluding that its deeper ancestry cannot now be recovered. The claim is therefore more than an internet rumour, but less than a documented genealogy.

Turkish state and Atatürk-research institutions give a different account. They trace the paternal line to the Kocacık Yörüks, Turkmen families moved from Anatolia into Macedonia, and cite family testimony identifying as Yörük. No surviving birth, census or family document settles the ethnic question. The responsible conclusion is: Atatürk may have had Albanian ancestry on his father's side; the evidence does not justify stating it as fact. His own political identity was unequivocally Turkish and civic, which ancestry would not alter.

The ones who say it themselves

These are the strongest entries, because there is nothing to argue with.

Hakan Şükür — Turkey's all-time leading scorer, 51 goals in 112 caps, scorer of the fastest goal in World Cup history — was speaking at a university in Burdur in February 2013, then an MP, when a student asked him about the Kurdish question. His answer, reported on the wire that day: "Ben bir Arnavut'um. Aslında bu açıdan bakarsanız Türk değilim. Ama bu topraklarda ekmek yedim. Bu topraklarda yaşıyorum." — "I am an Albanian. Looked at from that angle, I am in fact not a Turk. But I have eaten bread in this land. I live in this land." The line is usually quoted with the hedge and the two following sentences removed, which turns an argument for coexistence into a declaration of non-belonging. He was arguing the opposite of what the clipped version says.

Müge Anlı presents the most-watched daytime programme in Turkey. On 29 March 2020, discussing an honour killing in Şanlıurfa, she cut a guest off live on air: "You think these things only exist in Urfa. I am Albanian — we have them too. These are invisible rules." It is unprompted, it is on television, and it is about culture rather than trivia, which makes it the single best line in this section.

Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ, the biggest Turkish television export of the last two decades, has said on camera that his father is Albanian and his mother is from Edirne, and elsewhere that his paternal grandmother was from Sarajevo and his grandfather a Yugoslav — an Albanian and Bosniak paternal line out of the former Yugoslavia, which is the ordinary shape of these family histories.

Candan Erçetin, one of Turkey's most respected singer-songwriters and a vice-president of Galatasaray, told an audience in İzmir in 2014 that she was born to a family of Albanian and Macedonian origin — her mother from Pristina, her father from Skopje — and added: "The word Balkan, for me, carries sorrow. As the daughter of a migrant family, that's how I feel." The migration is audible in her records. And there is a pleasing symmetry in it: the club an Albanian's son founded in 1905 now has an Albanian-descended vice-president.

Fettah Can, the singer-songwriter, explained his twin daughters' names to Hürriyet in 2018: "I am Albanian. Cansu is Albanian too. Vera means summer in Albanian." A man who lost the language naming his daughter with one of its words is transmission of a kind.

Fuat Güner of MFÖ, one of the defining Turkish pop-rock acts of the last half-century, on his own temperament: "Once I fix on something I go all the way. I'm both an Aries and an Albanian. I don't let go." Ata Demirer, the comedian: "My mother is from the Ahıska Turks, my father is Albanian." The singers Simge ("My mother is Albanian, my father is from Amasya"), Derya Uluğ and Zeynep Bastık — whose claim is specifically about her maternal grandmother, "an old-school Albanian woman" — have each said it in named interviews.

And the geologist Celâl Şengör, of İstanbul Technical University and the US National Academy of Sciences, said the thing this whole page is about, in one breath, on television: "Look at my grandfather: a typical Albanian, with obvious Serb mixture. They are all Turks. Their passports say Turk. There isn't a drop of Turkish blood in my veins, brother." He then defined himself as a Turkish nationalist in Atatürk's civic sense. Ottoman-Balkan ancestry and wholehearted Turkish identity, held together without strain.

Football, and the two-way traffic

The traffic between Turkish football and the Albanian lands has run in both directions for a century, and it produces the most tangled identities on the page.

Kemal Halim Gürgen — in Albanian, Qemal Omari — founded İstanbulspor on 4 January 1926, having walked out of another club with a team behind him. In the early 1930s King Zog invited ethnic Albanians living in Turkey to raise the standard of Albanian football, and Gürgen went to Korçë, where he coached Skënderbeu from 1932 to 1938 and won the Albanian championship in 1933. Albanian accounts call him "the man from Korçë" and date the club to 1923; both go past the record, and even his family's Korçë origin is offered in Turkish sources as a suggestion.

Cevad Prekazi, born in Mitrovica to Kosovo Albanian parents, became a Galatasaray star in the 1980s and took Turkish citizenship — and, asked in 2017, said he still considers himself Yugoslav. Agim Cana played for Gençlerbirliği and Samsunspor in 1987 under the Turkish name Alim Can; twenty-three years later his son Lorik Cana, the captain of Albania, signed for Galatasaray. Ercan Osmani was born in Bajram Curri in Tropojë, in Albania, and plays basketball for Anadolu Efes and for the Turkish national team.

Two cases show why the categories on this page have to be handled carefully rather than tidied. Kenan Sipahi, born in Pristina and a Turkey basketball international, is described by Albanian outlets as a Kosovo Albanian and by Turkish ones as a Kosovo Turk; his parents' names appear in both spellings. Vedat Muriqi, Kosovo's all-time top scorer and a former Fenerbahçe striker, was born in Prizren into a Turkish-mother-tongue family and took Turkish citizenship in 2015 under the name Vedat Muriç. Kosovo Turk by language, Kosovar by team, Turkish by passport. He is not on this list, and the reason he is not is itself the point.

The names that do not survive checking

Every one of the following appears on at least one widely-shared list of famous Albanians of Turkey, and none of them belongs there.

Osman Hamdi Bey, the painter of The Tortoise Trainer and founder of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, is Greek in origin, not Albanian: his father İbrahim Edhem Pasha was a boy from Chios, orphaned after the 1822 massacre, and Osman Hamdi identified the family as the Skaramangas of Chios and was proud of it.

Enver Pasha's family was from Manastır, which is not the same as being Albanian, and the encyclopaedia's entry on him says nothing about Albanian origin. Ahmed Vefik Pasha's family is described by the same work as Turkish through and through. Sezen Aksu's father was Laz, from Rize, and her mother's family came from Salonica in the population exchange; the Albanian claim appears to be an inference from "Salonica". Barış Manço's family is documented as Konya-origin by way of Rumelia — a Turkish family that lived in Albanian-speaking lands, which is a different thing, and a good worked example of how the upgrade happens. Fatih Terim was born in Ceyhan, Adana, to a Turkish Cypriot father.

Emre Belözoğlu, Mehmet Okur, Arda Turan, Necati Cumalı and Özhan Canaydın all sit in the Turkish Wikipedia Albanian category; none of their own biographies contains any Albanian claim in the body text, and in one case the category tag has since been deleted. Bülent Ecevit, Süleyman Demirel and Mesut Yılmaz have no source at all — Ecevit in fact spoke publicly about Kurdish roots on his father's side. Kenan Evren's claim rests on two passing lines in unrelated books, visible only as search-engine snippets, which is not enough for a head of state.

None of this is a criticism of the people who repeat these lists. It is what happens when a community of well over a million people has no way of appearing in any official record: the ancestry gets reconstructed from surnames, birthplaces and guesswork, and nobody can check.

Turkey and the Albanians today

The old community and the modern relationship are two separate things, and the second one is loud. Turkey is among Kosovo's most popular countries and one of Albania's largest investors; Albanians and Kosovars fly to Turkey in numbers that have roughly tripled since 2010; and the descendants of people who once had to prove they were Turks in order to get in are now applying, in some numbers, for Kosovar and Albanian passports.

Two states, two figures, one accounting trick

Ask how big an investor Turkey is in Albania and the answer depends on which Turkish official you ask. In Tirana in January 2022 Erdoğan said Turkey was "the biggest investor in Albania, taking into account the contracting services as well", put the total at $3.5 billion, and said more than 600 Turkish companies employed nearly 15,000 people. Turkey's own embassy in Tirana currently states something quite different: an investment stock of $1.6 billion, making Turkey the fifth largest investor in Albania.

Both are official Turkish figures and both are current. They reconcile, and the reconciliation is in Erdoğan's own qualifier: the Turkish foreign ministry's Albania page gives investments of $3.5 billion alongside completed Turkish contracting projects worth $1.8 billion. Investment stock of about $1.6–1.7 billion plus $1.8 billion of construction contracts is $3.5 billion. It is the same number sliced two ways, and nobody appears to have said so before.

The trade figures, from the Turkish ministry's own table sourced to TÜİK, are less contested and less dramatic: total bilateral trade of $965 million in 2025, having peaked at $1,065 million in 2022. Turkey exports roughly twelve times what it imports.

The earthquake, and the mosque

The single most visible Turkish intervention in Albania followed the earthquake of 26 November 2019, which killed 51 people. Turkey's state housing agency TOKİ built 522 flats in Laç, breaking ground in December 2020 and handing over the keys on 17 January 2022. Erdoğan, Rama and the Turkish embassy all give the figure as 522; Albanian media reported 524. The cost has never been officially confirmed by either government — Turkish and Albanian outlets reported €42 million and about €45 million. The town's main square was renamed after Erdoğan following the visit. Laç is a Catholic pilgrimage town, and the visit fell on the anniversary of Skanderbeg's death.

On 10 October 2024 Erdoğan inaugurated the Namazgah Mosque in Tirana, built from 2015 with around €30 million from Diyanet, Turkey's state religious authority: four fifty-metre minarets, a thirty-metre dome, room for 8,000 worshippers, on a ten-thousand-square-metre site beside the Albanian parliament. The building had been finished for more than a year before it opened. The delay was Erdoğan's concern that the movement Turkey calls FETÖ would have influence over it, and under the agreement eventually reached with Albania's Muslim community, Diyanet took a seat on the mosque's governing board.

That dispute is the one genuinely sharp edge in the relationship. In March 2018 six Turkish nationals — teachers linked to the Gülen movement — were rendered from Kosovo to Turkey, a case that brought down Kosovo's interior minister and intelligence chief and is still in the courts. Turkey has pressed Albania over Gülen-linked schools; Albania's government maintains that a 2022 closure was a licensing matter. Both positions are on the record and this page does not adjudicate between them.

The traffic

The clearest measure of the modern relationship is people crossing the border, and Turkey's tourism ministry publishes it monthly.

Albanian visits to Turkey have roughly tripled since 2010, from 49,954 to 159,240. The more striking line is Kosovo's: with barely half Albania's population, Kosovo has sent more visitors to Turkey than Albania every single year since 2011, reaching 209,671 in 2025.

The way they travel says as much as the number. Albanian arrivals peak hard in August — a beach holiday. Kosovar arrivals run flatter and peak in September. And roughly a quarter of Albanian and thirty per cent of Kosovar arrivals come overland, through Edirne: Albanians crossing at İpsala from Greece, Kosovars at Kapıkule from Bulgaria. People driving from Tirana and Pristina, three countries in a day.

The reverse flow cannot be measured at all. Albania's statistics office publishes arrivals only by broad region, and Turkey is pooled with Cyprus and Israel in a grouping that recorded 384,048 arrivals in 2025 out of more than twelve million. Rama has complained about the gap publicly — standing next to Erdoğan in January 2022, he said he did not know how to describe how it felt seeing millions of Turkish tourists go to neighbouring countries while the number coming to Albania "does not match the level of love between peoples".

The same measurement problem swallows health tourism, which is the other thing Albanians and Kosovars go to Turkey for. As Balkan Insight established, Turkey's statistics agency does not collect health-tourism data broken down by Balkan country, and the president of the Turkish Health Tourism Association told it that private hospitals often decline to share their foreign-patient figures at all. Any specific number you see for Albanian or Kosovar medical travellers is an extrapolation. What can be said comes from the people running the wards: the Balkans director of Turkey's largest private hospital group told Balkan Insight that patient numbers from Kosovo, Bosnia and North Macedonia had risen sharply over five years, mostly for serious illness — transplants, oncology, paediatric cardiac surgery — and that price, proximity, family ties and the absence of a visa requirement are what bring them.

Affection without allegiance

Kosovo is the most reliably polled of the Albanian lands, and the results are unusually clean.

Those three numbers have to be read together. Kosovo likes Turkey more than it likes almost anywhere, and does not regard Turkey as its strategic partner. The Kosovar Centre for Security Studies puts it directly: popular support is "emotive and pragmatic rather than an ideological endorsement of Türkiye's political model". For calibration, the same 2025 poll found Bosnia's Türkiye favourability lower at 70 per cent — but there Türkiye is the leading answer for most important ally. Kosovo's pattern is specific to Kosovo.

There is no comparable poll of Albanian opinion about Turkey. IRI's Albania survey does not ask, and the regional poll excludes Albania. The absence is itself worth recording.

The passport, going the other way

In February 2018 Turkey opened a family-tree lookup on its e-Devlet government portal. It broke the site's traffic records and dominated the news for weeks, as millions of Turks pulled their ancestors out of Ottoman population registers. Some of those who found Balkan forebears began applying for second passports.

Bayram Şen describes what has happened since: substantial numbers of Turkish citizens of Balkan origin entering citizenship processes in Kosovo, Albania and North Macedonia, claiming through a father, grandfather or more distant ancestor — because it is, as he puts it, a practical route into the Schengen area. Turkish law firms now advertise the service by name: Soybağı Yoluyla Kosova Vatandaşlığı, Kosovo citizenship by descent.

Read that against the 1950s and it is very hard not to stop and look at it. To be allowed out of Yugoslavia, a family had to sit a test proving it was Turkish. Seventy years later their great-grandchildren are assembling documents to prove they are Albanian.

And the same portal is how the community finds itself. Kamil Bitiş, describing the families of Albanian descent in Bingöl, Diyarbakır, Doğubayazıt and Hakkari — where nobody has spoken Albanian for generations — told TRT World that they "have been trying to discover their own roots through social media and an e-government portal after Turkey launched an online genealogy service". Not a DNA kit. A government website.

How Albanians in Turkey connect

Every other page in this series can describe a diaspora looking for each other. Turkey is the one where the harder question is how you would even start.

In Germany or Switzerland an Albanian family is a recent arrival: the grandparents came in the 1970s or the 1990s, everyone still speaks the language, and the community is dense enough that the wedding of a cousin's cousin will put fifty eligible people in one hall. In Turkey the grandparents came in 1912, or 1953, or 1964. They were naturalised on arrival. They were told, and largely believed, that they had come home. They married out. Their grandchildren know they are Albanian and cannot say so in Albanian.

So the connective tissue that does the work elsewhere — the language, the neighbourhood, the association hall — has thinned to almost nothing here. Balkan Insight put it precisely: the Istanbul streets that were once filled with Albanians from a single village have come to an end, through changing urban dynamics, assimilation, marriage with non-Albanians and the passing of the older generation. What is left is a feeling, a surname, a grandmother's recipe, and a growing curiosity that sends people to a government website to look up their own ancestors.

What is actually happening now

Three things, all documented earlier on this page, and all pointing the same way. The Kosovo Cultural Centre in Bayrampaşa fills a free evening class with seventeen-year-olds and seventy-three-year-olds. Turks of Balkan descent are applying for Kosovar, Albanian and North Macedonian citizenship through a grandfather. And 209,671 Kosovars and 159,240 Albanians came through Turkey's borders last year, a quarter of them driving.

None of that is nostalgia. It is a community that kept the identity, lost the language, and has decided in the last decade that it would like some of it back.

That return takes different forms. For one person it means learning the language their grandparents stopped speaking. For another it means recovering citizenship or travelling to Kosovo or Albania. And for some, it means wanting Albanian identity to matter in the people they meet and the relationships they form.

Who people actually marry

This is the part of the story that decided everything else, and it can now be shown rather than asserted.

In the first generation, almost nobody married out. Berrin Çalışkan's 2019 fieldwork among Istanbul's Balkan migrant families found that every single one of her participants had married someone who had likewise migrated from Yugoslavia — and that marriage into the host society "was not accepted within the group for many years, and was judged". That is how a language survives three decades in a country that is not counting it.

It did not hold. Every witness on this page describes the same arc: Kamil Bitiş's children all married non-Albanian Turks; Balkan Insight found the dense single-village streets of Istanbul dissolved by "changing urban dynamics, assimilation, marriage with non-Albanians, and the passing on of the older generation". A community that married strictly inward for one generation and outward ever after is exactly the shape of a population that keeps its identity and loses its language — which is precisely what the census recorded happening between 1927 and 1965.

The cross-border traffic today is real but small. Turkey's statistical institute publishes marriages by the citizenship of each spouse: in 2025, out of 552,237 marriages in Turkey, 55 brides and 19 grooms were Albanian citizens, with a further 54 brides and 25 grooms from North Macedonia. From the other direction, Kosovo's statistics agency records marriages of its citizens registered as having taken place abroad — 178 of them in Turkey between 2012 and 2019, rising from thirteen a year to a peak of thirty-eight.

Those are small numbers against a community of a million-plus, and that is the point. The marriages that made Albanian Turkey happened inside it, and then stopped happening inside it.

These numbers should not be read as a measure of Albanian Turkey; they are far too small for that. They measure something narrower and arguably more interesting: people in Turkey for whom Albanian identity matters enough to seek another Albanian deliberately. Their connections point in two directions—back toward Kosovo and Albania, and outward toward the newer Albanian diaspora in western Europe.

The point of a platform, here

On the other pages in this series the pitch writes itself: there are a lot of you, you are hard to find, here is a way. Turkey needs a different sentence.

Here the community is not hard to find because it is scattered. It is hard to find because it is invisible — to a state record that stopped publishing language, to itself in a country where the ordinary label is Rumelian rather than Albanian, and to the person two streets away whose grandmother also came from Kaçanik. A surname will not tell you. A modern census will not tell you.

What a platform can do is small and specific: let people who have decided the identity matters to them say so, in one place, and find each other. Kamil Bitiş's classroom does the same thing on a Bayrampaşa street four nights a week, for the language. The pool is not millions, and this page is not going to pretend it is. It is the several thousand people who went looking.

A practical directory for Albanians in Turkey

Everything below was checked on 7 August 2026. Where an organisation is real but has no working website, that is said rather than papered over with a plausible link — and several widely-listed bodies turned out on inspection not to exist, which is noted at the end.

Diplomatic missions

North Macedonia maintains an embassy in Ankara and a consulate general in Istanbul, but publishes no public website for either — its Ankara domain redirects to a staff login page — and the contact details circulating on commercial directory sites could not be verified. Anyone needing them should go through the ministry in Skopje rather than trust an aggregator.

The Albanian consulate's address is worth one warning. The consulate's own site gives the Levent address above; the Albanian foreign ministry's central list of missions still gives an older address in Ulus. Both are official Albanian government pages. Telephone before travelling.

Entering, staying and working

• Visas. Citizens of Albania and of Kosovo holding ordinary, official or diplomatic passports are exempt from Turkish visas for tourism and transit, for up to 90 days within any six-month period from the date of first entry. This is the Turkish foreign ministry's own wording for both countries.
• Residence permits. Applications go through e-ikamet.goc.gov.tr; the state helpline for foreigners is YİMER. Permit types are short-term (issued for up to two years at a time), family (up to three years), student (for the duration of study) and long-term, which is indefinite and available after eight continuous years of permits.
• Fees, from 1 January 2026. The document fee is 964.00 TL, and no nationality is exempt from it. The residence-permit duty is 348.10 TL per day for the first month (minimum 653.70 TL, maximum 3,359.90 TL) and 2,232.30 TL for each month after that.
• One asymmetry worth knowing. Kosovar citizens are exempt from the residence-permit duty under the reciprocity principle, alongside Czechia, Denmark, Ireland, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkmenistan, Northern Cyprus and Palestine. Albanian citizens are not. On a year's permit that is a real difference in cost.
• Work permits are applied for by the employer in Turkey, through the labour ministry's systems at calismaizni.gov.tr. Do not rely on second-hand document lists; the requirements change.

Getting there

There is no ferry between Turkey and Albania or Kosovo, and there never has been; the Adriatic ferries from Durrës go to Italy.

• Istanbul–Tirana. Turkish Airlines resumed the route on 23 January 2026 with a daily service from Istanbul Airport. AJet, its low-cost arm, began flying Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen to Tirana five times a week from 2 March 2026, and Pegasus also serves the route from Sabiha Gökçen.
• Ankara–Tirana. New since 5 March 2026: AJet flies twice weekly, on Thursdays and Saturdays, from Ankara Esenboğa. The Turkish capital now has a direct Tirana link for the first time in recent memory.
• Istanbul–Pristina is served nonstop by Turkish Airlines, AJet and Pegasus; flight time is about an hour and forty minutes.
• Air Albania was founded in 2018 as a partnership in which Turkish Airlines held 49 per cent. In November 2025 Turkish Airlines announced it was selling the entire stake. Whether that sale has completed is not publicly established as of August 2026.
• By road. A direct coach runs Tirana to Istanbul, operated by Skënderbeu sh.p.k.: departing Tirana's Eastern Interurban Terminal at 10:30, calling at Shkodra, and reaching Istanbul's Esenler bus station at 05:30 the next morning. It runs six days a week — every day except Friday. Roughly a quarter of Albanian and thirty per cent of Kosovar arrivals in Turkey come overland, so this is a well-worn route, not an eccentric one.

Community organisations

Albanians in Turkey have no umbrella federation. What exists is a scatter of local associations, most without websites, alongside the much larger Rumeli and Balkan federations that Albanian families generally sit inside.

• Türk-Arnavut Kardeşliği Kültür ve Dayanışma Derneği — the Turkish-Albanian Brotherhood, based in Bayrampaşa, Istanbul, with branches in Küçükçekmece, Ankara and Bursa. Runs folklore evenings, language classes and 28 November independence-day commemorations. A copy of its statutes dated 1952 survives in the antiquarian book trade. It has no website; it maintains social-media accounts.
• Kosovo Cultural Centre, Bayrampaşa — opened 23 February 2013 by Kosovo's diaspora ministry, its first anywhere. Free evening Albanian classes, all ages.
• Merdivenköy Albanian association, Istanbul — founded around 2018, running Albanian classes on the Asian side.
• Bursa Kosova-Arnavutluk-Makedonya Kültür ve Yardımlaşma Derneği — held its first summer festival in Bursa's Zafer Park in June 2026, with a regional börek competition and a folk ensemble from Tetovo.
• Sakarya Arnavutları Kültür ve Dayanışma Derneği — Sakarya, dating itself to 1994.
• Çevretepe Köyü Arnavutlar Kültür ve Dayanışma Derneği — the only member of the Rumeli Balkan federation with "Albanians" in its name.
• TOKOB, the Union of Kosovar Students in Turkey — Istanbul-based, active on social media, with representatives in several cities.

Learning Albanian

• Trakya University, Edirne — the Albanian Language and Literature programme within the Department of Balkan Languages and Literatures. The only Albanian degree in Turkey, and the department that wrote the education ministry's Albanian curriculum.
• State schools — Albanian remains on the education ministry's list of "Living Languages and Dialects" electives for grades 5–8, under a 2016 protocol with Trakya University. It has only ever been taught at one school, in Kemalpaşa, İzmir, and monitoring visits found neither the village nor the teacher spoke Albanian. Treat it as a legal option rather than a place to learn the language.
• Evening and weekend classes — the Kosovo Cultural Centre in Bayrampaşa, the Merdivenköy association, Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul, and courses run with the Turgutlu Albanian culture association in Manisa.

Media and institutions

• Anadolu Agency publishes a full Albanian-language service at aa.com.tr/sq, and TRT broadcasts in Albanian on its international radio service.
• Arnavut Haber (arnavuthaber.com) publishes daily, mostly in Turkish with an Albanian-language section. It is worth knowing what it is: the masthead gives its publisher as Media Shqiptare, with an address in Tirana, no telephone and no named editor. It is a Tirana-published outlet covering Turkey's Albanians rather than a Turkey-based Albanian newspaper.
• Yunus Emre Institute runs Turkish cultural centres in Tirana, Shkodra, Pristina, Prizren, Peja and Skopje. Use the country sites — arnavutluk.yee.org.tr and kosova.yee.org.tr; the individual city subdomains that circulate all redirect to dead pages.
• Business. The Foreign Economic Relations Board runs a Turkey–Albania Business Council, established 1992, and a Turkey–Kosovo Business Council, established 2008.

Things that are listed elsewhere and are not real

Four entries recur in directories of "Albanian organisations in Turkey" and none of them survives a visit. There is no "Türkiye Arnavut Dernekleri Federasyonu"; the acronym TADF belongs to the Federation of Turkish American Associations, founded in the United States in 1956, which has no Albanian connection. TASIAD is not a Turkish-Albanian business association; it is the All-Elevator Manufacturers and Businesspeople Association. The domain arnavutkultur.com no longer resolves at all, and arnavut.com returns a page — which is the trap, because the page is an empty maintenance holder in Indonesian, and its association directory is gone.

The population ledger: what can and cannot be counted

The headline range of three to five million is not a census total. It is a working range that sits above a transparent reconstruction of more than two million. Four mechanisms prevent a direct count:

1. Ethnicity was never asked. Published censuses measured household language, so assimilated families were invisible from the first count.
2. Publication stopped after 1965. The 1970, 1975, 1980 and 1985 language results went only to state institutions.
3. The largest migration was recorded as Turkish. Albanians leaving Yugoslavia in the 1950s used the legal category that allowed them to emigrate.
4. Naturalisation erased the later boundary. Muslim Balkan migrants became Turkish citizens and disappeared into the national register.

What this page concludes

Three to five million is the working range this page uses. It is plausible but cannot be verified; what the surviving evidence supports on its own is more than two million people of Albanian descent. The number actively identifying as Albanian, and the number still speaking the language, are smaller populations that have never been measured nationally.

Corrections that matter

• The 1.3-million figure is not a 2008 government report; it is an unfinished c. 2000 university study that surfaced in 2008.
• Turkey did not stop asking about language in 1965; it stopped publishing the answers.
• The corrected 1935 Albanian mother-tongue count is 22,754, and the de-duplicated 1965 speaker total is 52,445.
• The 1934 Settlement Law does not name Albanians; an implementing circular does.
• The 1938 convention proposed 40,000 families and was never ratified.
• Chams did have a documented route to Turkey, especially through the Greek-supported migration channel of 1932–1940; the later 80,000–100,000 population estimate remains unverified.
• Albanian wedding customs in Turkey are documented in Ayşenur Tanık's 2025 Bursa fieldwork.

Last evidence review: 9 August 2026. Measurements, models and community claims are labelled separately so the range can be challenged at the correct step.