Muslim minority of Greece Greeks were required to leave Turkey, and the 356,000 Muslims outside of Thrace were required to leave Greece, including the Muslim Greek Vallahades of western Greek Macedonia. Consequently, most of the Muslim minority in Greece resides in the Greek region of Thrace, where they make up 28.88% of the population. Muslims form the largest group in the Rhodope regional unit (41.77%) and sizable percentages in the Xanthi (31.19%) and Evros regional units (4.65%). Nearly 300 Turks remain on the island of Rhodes and 200 on the island of Kos, as the islands were part of the Italian Dodecanese when the
Dodecanese sources in the 8th century, as a naval command under a "droungarios", encompassing the southern Aegean Sea, which eventually evolved into the Theme of Samos. However it was not applied to the current island group, but to the twelve Cyclades islands clustered around Delos. The name may indeed be of far earlier date, and modern historians suggest that a list of 12 islands given by Strabo ("Geographica" Χ.485) was the origin of the term. The term remained in use throughout the medieval period and was still used for the Cyclades in both colloquial usage and scholarly Greek-language literature until the