Pomakos
The Greek Pomaks live in the mountains of northern Greece – Thrace . It is a minority, 30.000 people. They were Islamized during the Ottoman Empire , and this makes them today to consider them selves Turkish along with the help of the Greek government in 1951, to introduce Turkish-language in their education as an effort to distance them from Bulgarian/Pomaks. They have their own language, Pomako, which belongs to the linguistic family of the Southern Slavic languages without written tradition and now limited exclusively to the immediate family environment. The girls usually married around 16 years old and parents don't see why to study after the high school once they will become wives and mothers having a lot of to take care, with rare exceptions. Their main occupation in the mountains is livestock farming and their primary product is tobacco. Although the plains of Thrace are particularly fertile and productive, the region nevertheless remains among the least developed in the European Union, so many leave the mountains to work abroad, mainly in Germany .
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