Lysimachia (Thrace) Lysimachia (Thrace) Lysimachia () was an important Hellenistic Greek town on the north-western extremity of the Thracian Chersonese (the modern Gallipoli peninsula) in the neck where the peninsula joins the mainland in what is now the European part of Turkey, not far from the bay of Melas (the modern Gulf of Saros). The city was built by Lysimachus in 309 BCE, when he was preparing for the last struggle with his rivals; for the new city, being situated on the isthmus, commanded the road from Sestos to the north and the mainland of Thrace. In order to obtain inhabitants for
Western Thrace of multiple ethnic groups. However, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, during his historic December 7, 2017 visit to Greece as President of Turkey, acknowledged for the first time the multi-ethnic nature of the Muslim minority. The last censuses which asked about ethnicity were held in the transitional period before the region became part of Greece. A number of estimates and censuses during the 1912-1920 period gave the following results about the ethnic distribution of the area that would become known as Western Thrace: The Pomak population depending on the source was sometimes counted together with the Turks (Muslims) following the Ottoman system