Karamanlides are a Turkish-speaking ethnic group that are of Orthodox Christian faith.
They numbered seveal hundred thousand and lived in the Karaman region of Turkey (in the Central Anatolia) and their origin is rather obscure: they could be either Orthodox Greeks that adopted Turkish language or Turks that converted to Christianity. They wrote the Turkish language with the Greek alphabet.
In the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey of 1921-1922, Turkey and Greece decided to exchange population based on religion, rather than on language, so all Muslims of Greece were deported to Turkey, while all Orthodox Christians of Turkey were deported to Greece.
Following this treaty, Greek-speaking Muslims (such as the Epirus and Cretan Muslims ) were sent to Turkey and all Turkish-speaking Christians (including the Karamanlides) were sent to Greece.
The Karamanlides had no easy time in their new country, as they did not speak Greek, and during the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, usage of Turkish in public was forbidden.
