Vilayet Edirne

The Vilâyet Adrianople around 1900

The Vilâyet Edirne ( Ottoman ولايت ادرنه İA Vilāyet-i Edirne ,) was a Vilāyet (province) of the Ottoman Empire .

Adrianople (Edirne) was conquered by the Ottomans in 1361 or after 1366 and was the capital of the Ottoman Empire until the conquest of Constantinople. Later it was the capital of the Eyaletes Rumeli. It was not until the 19th century that a vilayet was formed from it. It consisted of four sanjaks . This vilayet comprised areas in eastern Thrace in what is now the European part of Turkey as well as the eastern part of northern Greece and the southern edge of southern Bulgaria . The city of Edirne (formerly Adrianople ) was the capital of the vilayets. According to Edirne, which in 1905 had over 80,000 inhabitants, the most important cities were Rodosto (35,000), Gelibolu (25,000), Kırkkilise (16,000), Xanthi (14,000), Çorlu (11,500), Dimotika (10,000), Enos (8,000) , Gyumyurdzhina (8,000) and Dedeagatch (3,000). In the east the province bordered the Vilayet Istanbul , the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea , in the west on the Vilayet Saloniki , in the north on Bulgaria and in the south on the Aegean Sea .

In 1914 after the Second Balkan War and the expulsion of the Thracian Bulgarians , 306,411 inhabitants in Vilâyet Edirne were Muslims, in 1914 there were 224,680 Greeks, 19,773 Armenians and 22,525 Jews.

Map of the peoples of Vilayets Edirne in 1912, before the expulsion and murder of Thracian Bulgarians in 1913: the areas with a Bulgarian majority were in green, Turkish - red and Greek - brown

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Salname-yi Vilayetnameler i Edirne ( Yearbook of Vilayetnameler Edirne ), Edirne Vilayetnameler MATBAASI, Edirne, 1300 [1882]. On the Hathi Trust Digital Library website.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Adrianople . [vilayet] . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 1 : A-Androphagi . London 1910, p. 217 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} 1914 Census Statistics (PDF) General Staff of Turkey . Pp. 605-606. Archived from the original on October 7, 2011. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 29, 2011.