With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe thewest has been confronted with the existence ofseveral, little-understood Muslim ethnic groups inthis region whose contested histories can be tracedback to the Ottoman period and beyond. Previouslyoverlooked Muslim ethnies, such as the BulgarianTurks, Bosniaks, Pomaks, Kosovars, Chechens, andCrimean Tatars, have begun to receive considerableattention from both western scholars and the generalpublic. Much of the interest revolves around thequestion of the identity of these Muslim communitiesand the history of their formation as distinctethnic groups. The history of the formation of thesegroups has in many cases been contested terrain asBulgarian authorities, for example, attempted in the1980s to prove that the Bulgarian Turks wereactually “Turkified Bulgarians”, as the Greekgovernment sought to demonstrate that the Pomaks(Slavic Muslims) were actually Islamicized Greeks,and as Bosniaks were labelled “Turks” by theirSerbian nationalist foes in spite of their Slavicbackground.