Do Balkan people have a lot of Turkish blood in them, after centuries of Ottoman dominion?

No. It is the other way round. For various reasons…

When I was in Skopje a year ago, my super amazing hotel owner host mentioned me that many Slavic Macedonians believe that they definitely posess Turkish DNA. I asked him about what makes him think that way. The answer was…

…exciting drumroll…

His skin.

He was a typical handsome slavic man of fair hair and green eyes, a very manly and genuine laugh. Just his skin was “tanned”. He reasoned his skin tone to Turks.

It took me a good half an hour to describe that it is actually Turks who inherited Slavic and Greek DNA instead. He was surprised when I told him that half of my family is blonder than he himself and additionally, people in Western Turkey are mostly of fair complex.

Oghuz Turks were driven to the edge of ethnic extinction several times throughout the history. Many of Turkic men served in the armies of various entities, such as Gokturk Khanate, Uighur Khanate, Chinese Tang Dynasty, Umayyad & Abbasid Caliphates, AND MONGOLS. War, especially in a warring nomadic world punishes through mass death. Hence, Turks were always prone to breed faster and denser, just in order to survive and COMPENSATE those mass deaths.

Over time, the Turks’ DNA pool became shallow. This brings physical deficiencies if not “physically unappealing” individuals, by a large amount.

Eventually, facts like these made Turkish people easily inclined to interbreed with the individuals of other ethnic groups. Turkish lords indeed did seek beautiful and pretty females all around the world.

The famous Black Sea slave trade of Crimean Tatar Khanate was known to begin from the outer reaches of Finland. Ottoman lords took many pretty Slavic girls either for their harems or to be sold as sex slaves, especially from Balkans.

Slavs were seeing Turks as anything inhuman, and the religious paradigma of that time strongly advised AGAINST mating with an infidel or a heretic, for both of these sides. Back then, there was no ethnic identity, there was religious identity. Serb or Bulgar only meant Christian, while Turk only meant Muslim.

There are still people in Bulgaria who believe that all Turks are muslims.(Which is false by a long mile)

No, we don’t. And by Turkish blood I guess you mean genetic connections? The answer is still no and there have been genetic studies done on many people of the Balkans which show that there is little to no genetic connection.

Genetic studies on Serbs

Mitochondrial DNA perspective of Serbian genetic diversity.

No. Genetic studies have been done. And there is little to no Turkish blood amongst most Balkan people. Folk legends and all be damned.

However, there is a lot of Balkan blood in Turkish people. If you stop and think about it, it makes sense. The center of the Ottoman Empire was Istanbul, and everyone gravitated there. No Turks had any particular reason or want or need to settle in the Balkans (it happened, mostly for military reasons but was otherwise rare).

Then there was the reality of Islam. While a Muslim man can take a non-Muslim woman, their children would be Muslim and they’d forever on begin to identify as a Turk.

In fact, Turk was not so much a tribe but a culture and position of privilege inside the Ottoman Empire. Sometimes all Muslims who identified with the Ottoman Empire and lived in the Ottoman Empire were called ‘Turks.’ It was only Ataturk who revolutionized Turkish identity by making it related with origin - something very european but not very asian.

Blood? In that after military conquest there were inevitably rapes going on? Yes, I guess so. Maybe we do share some blood.

Cultural affinity? A lot. Basically the Southern part of Romania has more cultural affinity to Turkey than to any other country on earth. We love Turkish food, Turkish music and rhythm, Turkish way of understanding and bargaining, we spend our vacations in Turkey, some of our best footballers have played and even now many others play in the Turkish championship, many Romanians do business with Turkey and many Turkish businessmen do business in Romania.

It’s a tie that goes beyond political structures like the European Union or NATO.

However, we are quite convinced that if a foreign power would declare war on Romania, the first (and maybe the only) country that would defend us using their military capability (like Russia did in Syria) would be Turkey. The Americans wouldn’t have the time to arrive, while the other European powers don’t even have bullets to fill their weapons.

While if a country would ever declare war on Turkey, I personally would join the Turkish military as a volunteer and I would fight against the aggressors.

This cultural affinity and ties shouldn’t be taken lightly. I believe that somewhere in the future, Romania, through the will of its citizens, will join Turkey in a regional economic block or alliance, other than the European Union.