Turkey Emigration and Immigration

Online Sources

 * 1946-1971 Free Access: Africa, Asia and Europe, Passenger Lists of Displaced Persons, 1946-1971 Ancestry, free. Index and images. Passenger lists of immigrants leaving Germany and other European ports and airports between 1946-1971. The majority of the immigrants listed in this collection are displaced persons - Holocaust survivors, former concentration camp inmates and Nazi forced laborers, as well as refugees from Central and Eastern European countries and some non-European countries.
 * Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild Choose a volume and then choose your country under "Listed by Port of Departure" or "Listed by Port of Arrival".

Finding the Town of Origin in Turkey
If you are using emigration/immigration records to find the name of your ancestors' town in Turkey, see Turkey Finding Town of Origin for additional research strategies.

Turkey Emigration and Immigration
"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country. Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.

Immigration into Turkey

 * Historically, the Ottoman Empire was the primary destination for Muslim refugees from areas conquered—or re-conquered—by Christian powers, notably Russia in the Caucasus and Black Sea areas, Austria-Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro (later Yugoslavia) and Romania in the Balkans. *Nonetheless, the Ottoman Empire was also a popular destination for non-Muslim refugees, the most obvious examples are the Sephardic Jews given refuge mainly in the 16th century with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal and the village of Polonezköy in İstanbul.
 * From the 1930s to 2016, migration added two million Muslims in Turkey. The majority of these immigrants were the Balkan Turks who faced harassment and discrimination in their homelands.
 * New waves of Turks and other Muslims expelled from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia between 1951 and 1953 were followed to Turkey by another exodus from Bulgaria in 1983–89, bringing the total of immigrants to nearly ten million people.
 * More recently, Meskhetian Turks have emigrated to Turkey from the former Soviet Union states (particularly in Ukraine - after the Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014).
 * Many Iraqi Turkmen and Syrian Turkmen have taken refuge in Turkey due to the '''recent Iraq War (2003-2011) and Syrian Civil War (2011–present).
 * After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and following the Turkish War of Independence, an exodus by the large portion of Turkish (Turkic) and Muslim peoples from the Balkans (Balkan Turks, Albanians, Bosniaks, Pomaks), Caucasus (Abkhazians, Ajarians, 'Circassians', Chechens), Crimea (Crimean Tatar diaspora), and Crete (Cretan Turks) took refuge in present-day Turkey.
 * Population exchange between Greece and Turkey brought 400,000 Muslims from Greece. In 1923, more than half a million Muslims of various nationalities arrived from Greece as part of the population transfer between Greece and Turkey (the population exchange was not based on ethnicity, but by religious affiliation; as Turkey was seen as a Muslim country while Greece was viewed as a Christian country).
 * Expulsions from Balkans & Russia, 1925-1961: After 1925, Turkey continued to accept Turkic-speaking Muslims as immigrants and did not discourage the emigration of members of non-Turkic minorities. More than 90% of all immigrants arrived from the Balkan countries. Turkey continued to receive large numbers of refugees from former Ottoman territories, until the end of Second World War.
 * Turkey received 350,000 Turks between 1923 and 1930. From 1934–45, 229,870 refugees and immigrants came to Turkey.
 * An agreement made, on September 4, 1936, between Romania and Turkey allowed 70,000 Romanian Turks to leave the Dobruja region for Turkey.
 * Between 1935–40, for example, approximately 124,000 Bulgarians and Romanians of Turkish origin emigrated to Turkey.
 * Between 1954-56 about 35,000 Muslim Slavs emigrated from Yugoslavia. An additional 160,000 people (mostly Albanians) immigrated to Turkey after the establishment of Communist Yugoslavia from 1946 to 1961. Since 1961, immigrants from that Yugoslavia amounted to 50,000 people.
 * German and Austrian refugees escaping from Nazism took refugee in Turkey in the 1930s. Around 800 refugees including university professors, scientists, artists and philosophers, sought asylum in Turkey between 1933 and 1945.


 * Taking into consideration the mass migrations of 1878, the First World War, the 1920s early Turkish Republican era, and the Second World War, overall, a total of approximately 100,000 Turkish Cypriots had left the island for Turkey. By 2001, approximately 500,000 Turkish Cypriots were living in Turkey.
 * The "Big Excursion" is the most recent immigration influx was that of Bulgarian Turks and Bosniaks. In 1989, an estimated 320,000 Bulgarian Turks fled to Turkey to escape a campaign of forced assimilation. As of December 31, 1994, an estimated 20,000 Bosniaks were living in Turkey, mostly in the Istanbul area.
 * Turkey's migrant crisis or Turkey's refugee crisis is a period during 2010s characterized by high numbers of people arriving in Turkey. Reported by UNHCR in 2018, Turkey is hosting 63.4% of all the refugees (from Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan) in the world. As of 2019, Refugees of the Syrian Civil War in Turkey (3.6 million) are highest "registered" refugees.

Emigration From Turkey

 * The "Turkish diaspora" refers to ethnic Turkish people who have migrated from, or are the descendants of migrants from,
 * the Republic of Turkey (mainland Anatolia and Eastern Thrace i.e. the modern Turkish borders) or
 * other modern nation-states that were once part of the former Ottoman Empire.
 * the Balkans (such as Bulgaria, Greece, North Macedonia, Romania etc.)
 * the island of Cyprus
 * the region of Meskhetia in Georgia
 * some parts of the Arab world (such as Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria).


 * In particular, most mainland Turkish migration has been to Western and Northern Europe.
 * Meanwhile, almost all the Turkish minorities in former Ottoman lands have a large diaspora in the Republic of Turkey.
 * The Cretan Turks have migrated throughout the Levant.
 * Cypriot Turks have a significant diaspora in the English-speaking countries '''(especially the UK and Australia).
 * The Meskhetian Turks have a large diaspora in Central Asia.
 * Algerian Turks and Tunisian Turks have mostly settled in France.
 * Since Bulgarian Turks and Romanian Turks gained EU citizenship in 2007, their diasporas in Western Europe significantly increased once restrictions on movement came to a halt in 2012.

For Further Reading
There are additional sources listed in the FamilySearch Catalog:
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