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Islamization of Albania - WikipediaIslamization of Bosnia and Herzegovina - WikipediaIslam in Kosovo - WikipediaAlbania, Bosnia, and Kosovo may be contiguous, but the reason why they became majority Muslim is not the same, and is more complicated than some of the answers given allude.It’s also true that Muslim numbers were much higher in the rest of the Balkans than the post-1920s population counts indicate, as Brian Collins's answer alludes to; parts of Eastern Bulgaria were already majority Muslim in the 16th century (Silistra 72%, Chirmen 88%, Nikopol 22%).Some of what Wikipedia reports is already partly addressed by other answers:In the 16th century, Ottoman censuses indicate Bosnia was already substantially Muslim (Bosnia 46%, Herzegovina 43%, urban Sarajevo 100%). This is attributed to the fact that the hold of Christianity on Bosnia was already tenuous, as the Bosnian Church was persecuted as heretical (Bogomils) by both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches—making Bosnians all the more eager to embrace Islam. (This is reminiscent of how the monophysites of the Middle East embraced Islam 800 years before.)In those same censuses, Albania was still 5% Muslim in most areas, and Islamisation came later; in particular, there were concerted reprisals and repression after Catholic rebellions from the 1570s on, with the steepest decreases in Christianity in Northern Albania happening in the 1630s–1670s.Central Albania appears to have converted at around the same period, and possibly ran to completion earlier than in Northern Albania; the account in Wikipedia is less clearcut, and refers to the rivalry of the bishops of Ohrid and Ioannina, and the easier access of the Ottomans to the area through the Via Egnatia road. Again, islamisation campaigns started in 1570 in response to local rebellion.While the Wikipedia article on Kosovo speaks breezily of the tax advantages for converting to Islam, the article on Albania attributes the islamisation of Kosovo to its depopulation after the 1683–1699 Great Turkish War: “After the flight of Serbs, the Pasha of Ipek (Albanian Peja, Serbian Pec) forced Catholic Albanians in the North to move to the now depopulated plains of Southern Serbia, and forced them to convert to Islam there.”Southern Albania converted to Islam as late as the late 18th century, as Albanians rebelled against the Ottomans and were held in suspicion after the Russian-instigated Orlov revolt of 1770. “In the 19th century, Albania as a whole, and especially Southern Albania, was notable as a rare region in the Ottoman Balkans where the Christian population was still losing considerable numbers of adherents to Islamization”So:Not all of Bulgaria remained Christian. Nor for that matter did all of Greece. (Half the population of Crete was Muslim in 1800.)The Bosnians converted earliest, because they were regarded as heretics by the major Christian churches.Albania and Kosovo were converted in response to rebellions and wars with Christian powers, through both direct and indirect pressure (taxation). The conversion happened at different rates in different regions, and with a lot of resistance (including widespread crypto-Christianity.)The fratricidal religious conflict in Southern Albania (which enveloped the Aromanian and Greek population there, and which the notorious Ali Pasha of Ioannina figured in) is a backdrop to the Greek War of Independence, which continued that fratricidal conflict. Not that anyone in the region saw it that way at the time, and Greeks still don’t, because religion trumped ethnicity; so Markos Botsaris and Omer Vrioni could not be regarded by anyone as brothers, although they both spoke Tosk Albanian, and their ancestral villages were 300km apart. (Botsaris: Ambelia (formerly Dragani) in Thesprotia; Vrioni: Ullinja (formerly Vrioni), near Berat.)

Lemnos is often cited as a late survival of Romeic identity, because of the renowned anecdote of what happened when the Greek army arrived in 1912:On 8 October 1912, during the First Balkan War, Lemnos became part of Greece. The Greek navy under Rear Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis took it over without any casualties from the occupying Turkish Ottoman garrison, who were returned to Anatolia. Peter Charanis, born on the island in 1908 and later a professor of Byzantine history at Rutgers University recounts when the island was occupied and Greek soldiers were sent to the villages and stationed themselves in the public squares. Some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. ‘‘What are you looking at?’’ one of them asked. ‘‘At Hellenes,’’ the children replied. ‘‘Are you not Hellenes yourselves?’’ a soldier retorted. ‘‘No, we are Romans." - LemnosBut there’s nothing specially Byzantine about Lemnos. Or rather, there’s nothing more Byzantine about Lemnos than about Istanbul, where the remaining ethnic Greeks continue to call themselves Roman today: Nick Nicholas's answer to Do modern Greeks self identify as Roman?Greek Orthodox people in the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans. Greek Orthodox people in the Ottoman Empire continued to call themselves Romans, and that’s what the Ottoman Empire considered them too, part of the Rum Millet. That was a credal community, not an ethnic community; but as it happens, almost all ethnic Greeks were Greek Orthodox, and therefore Romans.(Greek Catholics, like the ancestors of Markos Vamvakaris? They were not Romans, but Franks; although the Catholics only got their own Frenk Millet in the 19th century.)Now, the identification of ethnic Greeks, or Greeks nationals, as Hellenes was a project undertaken by the Modern Greek state. That introduced an easy distinction: any Greek inside the Modern Greek state was a Hellene, to the Greek state, and they rapidly came to call themselves Hellenes. Those Hellenes were likewise Yunan (Ionians i.e. Hellenes) to the Ottoman state.Any Greek outside the Modern Greek state was a Hellene to the Greek state too. But Greeks living outside the Modern Greek state did not have the full weight of the Greek state telling them they were Hellenes. They increasingly had teachers and intellectuals, from Greece and locally, propagandising their Hellenic identity; but the Ottoman default remained in place. The Turks ruling them called them Rum, and ethnic Greeks by default continued to call themselves Roman.Lemnos was not part of the Greek State until 1912. When the Greek Army arrived, it found that the locals had not been fully consciousness-raised: the children fell back on the Byzantine and Ottoman default. That wasn’t just Lemnos: that scenario would have played out again throughout the Aegean, and Macedonia, and Epirus, and all the territorial gains Greece made in the Balkan Wars. It wasn’t because Lemnos was more Byzantine: it was simply because those territories joined the Greek state later, and because nationalist consciousness-raising took a while to propagate.The scenario wasn’t repeated in the Dodecanese, which passed to Italian rule in 1913, and which only became part of Greece in 1946. But that’s because Greeks worked longer on making the Dodecanesians embrace a Hellenic rather than Roman identity; and Mussolini’s attempt to make loyal Italians of them encouraged the locals to embrace identification with the Greek state (panicked, inter alia, that they would be forced by Italy to become Catholics—remember that “Roman” actually meant “Greek Orthodox”). But that was conscious work, which Nicholas Doumanis has written about.The scenario wasn’t repeated in Cyprus either, because the Greek Cypriots were consciousness-raised to identify as Hellenes during British rule. (Know why Cypriots have the ancient Greek -ides suffix as a surname suffix? A lot of those consciousness-raisers were teachers that came not from Greece, but from Asia Minor. And Greeks in Asia Minor adopted the -ides suffix in their surnames early.) But tellingly, to this day, Turks don’t call Greek Cypriots Ionian. They call them Cyprus Romans: Kıbrıs Rumları (or Kıbrıs Yunanları, Turkish Wikipedia concedes, but the article itself does differentiate Ionians and Romans carefully.) To Greece, all ethnic Greeks are Hellenes; to Turkey, only Greek nationals are.As it happens, Istanbul Greeks call themselves Romans (and more rarely Hellenes). The ethnic Greeks in Albania now call themselves Hellenes, as far as I know; but I remember finding a folksong collection from the Greek minority, plaintively titled Δεν είμαστε και μεις Ρωμιοί; “Aren’t we too Romans?”Of course, I’m being unfair: the song lyric dates from the 1910s, and protests the fact that they were not permitted to join the Greek state:And while the song is about yearning for the Greek state, it authentically uses the strange, dissonant, and not that Byzantine polyphony of their corner of the Balkans (Albanian iso-polyphony). Αnd is all the more authentic because it does not use the name or the civic identity the Greek state was imposing on its citizens. The ethnic Greeks of Albania, too, were Romans, not Hellenes. And in 1913, Roman to them meant Greek Orthodox—“christened using oil”:Τι να του κάνω του θεού που έχει καρδιά μεγάληΚι αφήνει ν-ατιμώρητα κρίματα κι αδικίες!Να ‘ριχνε πίσσα και φωτιά σ’ολους τους μεγαλαίους,Όπου μας εχωρίσανε σαν το παΐδι ’π’ τη μάνα.Και πού σας φταίξαμε, τρανοί , για να μας τυραγννάτε;Αχ, Θεέ μου παντοδύναμε, πολύπαθε Χριστέ μου,Απλώστε το χεράκι σας και προς τεμάς τους δόλιους!Δεν είμαστε κι εμείς Ρωμιοί και λαδοβαφτισμένοι;I would blame God for being so kind-hearted,to leave injustices and crimes unpunished.He should rain pitch and fire on all the mighty,who split us, children that have lost their mother.How did we earn your torment, men of power?Oh God almighty, Christ long-suffering,hold out your hand to us unfortunates.Aren’t we, too, Romans, christened using oil?

I’m going to give one for each decade from the 30s through the 70s. I’m going to put up, not necessarily my favourite songs, but the songs I think have had the greatest cultural impact.1935. Φραγκοσυριανή (Frangosyriani): Catholic Girl from Syros. Lyrics: Markos Vamvakaris. Music: Markos Vamvakaris.Markos was the master of the Peiraeus tradition of rebetiko, which switched from an Anatolian, plaintive setting for songs about hashish and swag, to a Greek, jaunty setting for songs about hashish and swag.Frangosyriani marks the beginning of the end of the tradition. Wikipedia says it was written in ’35, but it already sounds like it was written in ’36, when the Metaxas dictatorship censored both the lyrics and—more lastingly—the scales of rebetiko. It’s just a list of scenic locations in Syros where Markos would take his fellow Catholic girlfriend. Its music lacks the bite of what made Markos great.But this is his lasting legacy, a tune that gets everyone swaying, a tune suffused with elegance and romance—and jauntiness.Here’s the best known, 1960 recording.stixoi.info: ΦραγκοσυριανήI have a swelling, a flame, inside my heartas if you’ve cast a spell on me, sweet Catholic girl from Syros.I’ll come meet you down by the beach.I’d like to fill you with caresses and kisses.I’ll take you on a trip to Finikas and Parakopi,to Galissa and Della Grazia, even if I get a heart attack.At Pateli, at Nichori, a fine time at Alithini,and romancing at Piskopio, my sweet Catholic girl from Syros.1948. Συννεφιασμένη Κυριακή (Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki): Cloudy Sunday. Lyrics: Alekos Gouveris or Vasilis Tsitsanis. Music: Vassilis Tsitsanis.If Markos was master of the Peiraeus blues, Tsitsanis was master of what came next: the transformation of rebetiko into a genre palatable to the masses, cleaned up, and with virtuoso flourishes.Cloudy Sunday is the song that, at least when I was young, every Greek knew by heart, and was guaranteed to bring a tear to every Greek’s eye. It has a dignified, stately melancholy to it, a proud swelling of the heart.Tsitsanis let it be understood that the song was written in 1942, while Athens all around him was starving. That was no doubt a big part of why the song became so well loved. The prevalent theory is that the lyrics were written in 1946 by a friend of his, because his soccer team had lost that Sunday.In truth, that doesn’t diminish the song a bit. The song stands just fine on its own. Here’s the definitive performance by the great Stelios Kazantzidis.stixoi.info: Συννεφιασμένη ΚυριακήCloudy Sunday, you’re like my heart,that’s always overcast—Oh Christ and Virgin Mary.When I see you all rainy, I have not a moment’s peace.You blacken my life, and I sigh bitterly.You’re a day just like the day I lost my joy.Cloudy Sunday, you make my heart bleed.1958. Δυο πόρτες έχει η ζωή (Dio Portes Echi i Zoi): Life has two doors. Lyrics: Eftichia Papagianopoulos. Music: Stelios Kazantzidis.Kazantzidis also wrote songs, and this is perhaps one of his greatest.Kazantzidis is perhaps an acquired taste. In my youth, I dismissed him as boorish, mawkish, too Oriental. I matured, I learned there’s a place for that in life. I learned that pain in life deserves wallowing in music. And after I took part in a drunken singalong to this, I could never dismiss him again.I’m living my last night tonight.And those who have embittered me so,now that I am leaving life behind,I forgive them all.Everything is but a lie,a breath, a sigh.Like a flower, a handwill cut us one dawn.Where I am going, tears and pain have no purchase.Suffering and sorrowwill stay behind in life,and I will leave alone.Life has two doors: I opened one and went in.I took a stroll one morning,and by the time sunset cameI left by the other.1962. Ένα Δειλινό (Ena dilino): One evening. Lyrics: Mikis Theodorakis. Music: Mikis Theodorakis.Theodorakis is a defining figure in Greek music and Greek politics; his star has been tarnished, but he expressed a generation, and that does not change, even if the generation has become disillusioned since.This was likely his greatest song, where he transformed the bouzouki song into a a not-so traditional lament for the dead. The song was one of many Theodorakis used in his play on the recent Greek Civil War—each and every one a hit.And none more transcendental in its keening than this.stixoi.info: Ένα δειλινόOne evening, they bound you to the cross.They nailed your hands, they nailed my insides.They bound your eyes, they bound my soul.One evening, they broke me in two.They stole my sight, they took my touch,My hearing remains, to listen to you, my child.One evening, like the golden eagle,swoop over the sea, swoop over the fields.Make the mountains flower, and the people rejoice.1974. Τα λόγια και τα χρόνια (Ta logia ke ta chronia): The Lost Words and Years. Lyrics: Manos Eleftheriou. Music: Yannis Markopoulos.I’ve already posted about this song, and its cultural resonance, in Nick Nicholas's answer to What are your favourite lyrics?Yes, there’s wild applause whenever the altered lyrics alluding to the Athens Polytechnic uprising are sung (“Friday the Killer’s night”). That kept happening throughout the 70s.