By Emin Avundukluoglu
ANKARA (AA) – Turkey's parliament speaker on Tuesday slammed Greece’s president for calling the Turkish Muslim minority in the country as a "Greek Muslim minority".
"I strongly condemn the racist remarks of Greek President [Prokopios] Pavlopoulos that ignore the Western Thrace’s Turks," Mustafa Sentop said in a tweet.
"Western Thrace Turks exist there and will continue to exist," Sentop added.
He said that Turkey would always stand by "our brothers living in the Balkans".
On Sunday, visiting Western Thrace, a Greek region with a large Muslim Turkish population, Pavlopoulos claimed that under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the Turks of Western Thrace are only a religious minority, whereas the Orthodox Greeks living in Istanbul are a national minority.
