Turks of the Dodecanese Turks of the Dodecanese The Turks of the Dodecanese are a community of 2,000 Turkish-speaking people and ethnic Turks living on the Dodecanese islands of Rhodes () and Kos () who were not affected by the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, since the islands were under the rule of the Kingdom of Italy at the time (from 1912). All inhabitants of the islands became Greek citizens after 1947 when the islands became part of Greece. As a result of this incorporation into Greece and due to the situation following the Cyprus conflict and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus
Massacres during the Greek War of Independence the islands in the Aegean Sea, in the early years of the Greek revolt. According to historian William St. clair, one of the aims of the Greek revolutionaries was to embroil as many Greek communities as possible in their struggle. Their technique was ""to engineer some atrocity against the local Turkish population"", so that these different Greek communities would have to ally themselves with the revolutionaries fearing a retaliation from the Ottomans. In such a case, in March 1821, Greeks from the Samos island had landed in the Island Chios and attacked the Muslim population living in that island. The