ABTTF President: “While our primary schools are being closed in violation of our educational autonomy, and despite the fact that we constitute the majority of the population in the prefecture of Rodopi and nearly half of the population in the prefecture of Xanthi, permission is not granted to open bilingual Turkish minority kindergartens. While our request for a new building for the Xanthi Turkish Minority Middle and High School has been ignored for years, the claim in the news that our community lives in complete freedom and equality in our country is nothing more than an attempt to cover up the facts’’.
The 20 August 2025 issue of the Greek newspaper Political published a report on the closure of three more primary schools belonging to the Turkish community in Western Thrace during the 2025-2026 school year.
The article indicated that the Turkish national press had criticised Greece for closing three minority primary schools and accused it of violating the Treaty of Lausanne, arguing that school closures were a practice applied throughout Greece due to lack of sufficient pupils. The article also claimed that the Muslim minority in Greece lived in complete freedom and equality.
‘‘The news published in the Political newspaper is one-sided and far from objective, as it ignores the fact that the application of the 2010 decision of the Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs and Sports to Turkish primary schools with special and autonomous status in Western Thrace is a clear violation of the Treaty of Lausanne, which guarantees the educational autonomy of our community. Our children’s right to education in their mother tongue, one of their most fundamental human rights, is being violated. On the other hand, in our homeland Türkiye, permission has been granted to open a Greek primary school on Gökçeada for only three students at the request of the Greek Orthodox minority. While our primary schools are being closed in violation of our educational autonomy, and despite the fact that we constitute the majority of the population in the prefecture of Rodopi and nearly half of the population in the prefecture of Xanthi, permission is not being granted to open bilingual Turkish minority kindergartens. While our request for a new building for the Xanthi Turkish Minority Middle and High School has been ignored for years, the claim in the news report that our community lives in complete freedom and equality in our country is nothing more than an attempt to cover up the facts’’, said Halit Habip Oğlu, President of the Federation of Western Thrace Turks in Europe (ABTTF).
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