Rumelia

Map of Rumelia as of 1801.

Rumelia (Turkish & Albanian: Rumeli; Greek: Ρωμυλία, Romylía, or Ρούμελη, Roúmeli; Bosnian, Serbian and [Румелија, Rumelija] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help); Bulgarian: Румелия, Rumeliya) was a historical region comprising the territories of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Formerly known as Turkey in Europe or Roumelia in English, Rumelia comes from the Turkish Rumeli, meaning "land of the Romans" (i.e., the Byzantine Empire). As such, it was originally used in Turkish to describe the lands of that empire in Anatolia; however, following the Islamization of that region and the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmet II, it was applied to the southern Balkan regions of the Ottoman Empire, which remained primarily Christian.

Rumelia included the provinces of Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Thrace, Macedonia and Moesia, today's Bulgaria and Turkish Thrace, bounded to the north by the rivers Sava and Danube, west by the Adriatic coast, and south by the Morea. The name Rumelia was ultimately applied to a province composed of central Albania and north-western Macedonia, with Bitola for its chief town.

Owing to administrative changes effected between 1870 and 1875, the name ceased to correspond to any political division. Eastern Rumelia was constituted as an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty of Berlin, 1878, but on September 6, 1885, after a bloodless revolution, it was united with Bulgaria. The Kosovo Vilayet was created at 1877.

Today, in Turkey, the word Trakya has mostly replaced Rumelia when referring to the part of Turkey which is in Europe (provinces of Edirne, Kırklareli, Tekirdağ, the northern part of Çanakkale Province and the western part of İstanbul Province), though Rumelia remains in use in historical contexts, and the word is used in the context of the culture of current Turkish populations of the Balkans and descendants of Turkish immigrants from the Balkans. This region in Turkey is also referred to as Eastern Thrace or Turkish Thrace. In Greece, the term Ρούμελη (Rumeli) has been used since Ottoman times to refer to Central Greece, especially when juxtaposed with Morea. The word "Rumeli" is also used in some cases (mostly by Istanbul denizens) to refer exclusively to the part of Istanbul Province that is situated west of the Bosphorus.

See also

• Upper Thracian Plain in Bulgaria
• Western Thrace in Greece
• European Turkey
• Ottoman Greece
• Rumelia Eyalet