Minorities in Turkey Minorities in Turkey Minorities in Turkey form a substantial part of the country's population, with at least an estimated 30% of the populace belonging to an ethnic minority. While the Republic of Turkey, following the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, recognizes Armenians, Greeks and Jews as ethnic minorities, this legal status is not granted to Muslim minorities, such as the Kurds, which constitute the largest minority by a wide margin (13–18%), nor any of the other minorities in the country. The amount of ethnic minorities is suspected to be underestimated by the Turkish government. Ethnic Albanians, Pontic Greeks, Kurds, Arabs, Bosniaks,
Turkish people remaining 0.2% is mostly Christian and Jewish. There are also some estimated 10 to 15 million Alevi Muslims in Turkey. Christians in Turkey include Assyrians/Syriacs, Armenians, and Greeks. Jewish people in Turkey include those that descend from Sephardic Jews who escaped Spain in 15th century and Greek-speaking Jews from Byzantine times. There is an ethnic Turkish Protestant Christian community most of them came from recent Muslim Turkish backgrounds, rather than from ethnic minorities. According to KONDA research, only 9.7% of the population described themselves as "fully devout," while 52.8% described themselves as "religious." 69.4% of the respondents reported that they