A coastal Albanian region on the wrong side of a 20th-century border
Chameria (Albanian: Çamëria; Greek: Tsamouriá) is a coastal stretch of Epirus in northwestern Greece, just across the modern border from southern Albania. For most of the late medieval and Ottoman periods, it was predominantly Albanian-inhabited — a mixed community of Muslim and Orthodox Christian Albanians (the Cham Albanians, in Albanian Çamët), speaking their own variety of Tosk Albanian.
After the 1913 Treaty of London drew the new Greek-Albanian border, Chameria fell on the Greek side. Three decades later, at the end of the Second World War, the Muslim Cham population was expelled from Greece in 1944-1945. Tens of thousands crossed into Albania. Their Orthodox neighbors largely remained and were absorbed into the Greek state.
Today the descendants of the Muslim Chams form a recognizable community in Vlorë, Sarandë, and Tirana, with a meaningful diaspora in the United States — concentrated in metropolitan New York and Boston — and in Western Europe and Turkey. The dialect, the songs, the family names, and the memory of specific villages in Thesprotia and Preveza have held together for more than three generations now.
This is a sensitive subject, and one where Greek, Albanian, and international historiography differ on important points. What follows is an effort to present what is widely accepted, name the points of disagreement honestly, and give Albanian American readers researching their family history a factual frame to work from.
Where Chameria is and what it covers
Chameria sits in the southwestern corner of Epirus, the historic region that today is split between southern Albania and northwestern Greece. The Albanian part is sometimes called Epiri i Veriut — Northern Epirus. The Greek part includes Chameria along its Ionian coast and inland.
In modern Greek administrative geography, Chameria corresponds roughly to most of the regional unit of Thesprotia and the western parts of the regional unit of Preveza, with the city of Igoumenitsa (in Albanian, Gumenicë) as the largest urban anchor.
The region is bounded by the Ionian Sea to the west, the Pindus mountains rising to the east, the modern Albanian border to the north, and the Acheron river valley loosely marking its southern edge. Two rivers run through it. The Thyamis (Albanian: Kalamas) cuts across the northern half. The Acheron — the river of classical Greek mythology — runs along the south.
Historic Cham towns and villages include:
- Filiates (Albanian: Filat) — a town in northern Thesprotia historically with a substantial Muslim Cham population.
- Paramythia (Albanian: Paramithia) — a hilltop town with a long Cham presence.
- Margariti (Albanian: Margëlliç) — a coastal commune in southern Thesprotia, historically a major Muslim Cham center.
- Konispol — now a town in southern Albania, but at the historic edge of the Cham-speaking belt.
The geography matters because it shaped the community. The coastal plains and river valleys supported settled agricultural villages; the surrounding mountains supported pastoral routes and the seasonal movement that connected Chameria to the broader Albanian-speaking world to the north.
The medieval Albanian presence in Epirus
Albanian-speaking communities have lived in Epirus, including what later became Chameria, since at least the late medieval period. Mainstream scholarship traces a southward expansion of Albanian-speakers through the 13th and 14th centuries, as the Despotate of Epirus — a Byzantine successor state — gave way to Serbian and then Albanian-led principalities in the region.
The 14th century saw the rise of Albanian-led polities in Epirus, including under members of the Shpata and Losha families, who controlled significant territories around Arta and the Thesprotian coast for several decades. The Albanian presence was already substantial enough to be recorded by Byzantine, Venetian, and Italian observers as a distinct ethnographic feature of the region.
When the Ottomans consolidated control of Epirus in the 15th century, the existing Albanian-speaking population remained in place. Over the following centuries, parts of the community converted to Islam — common across Albanian-speaking lands under Ottoman administration — while a substantial Orthodox Christian Albanian community persisted alongside the Muslim majority and alongside Greek-speaking neighbors.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, Chameria had a layered religious and linguistic profile: Muslim Cham Albanians, Orthodox Cham Albanians, Greek-speaking communities (especially in coastal towns and along the southern edge), and smaller minorities including Vlachs and Roma. Local elites included Muslim Albanian beys and Orthodox merchant families. The mosques of Margariti and the churches of Paramythia coexisted in the same towns.
This is the Chameria that entered the 20th century: an Albanian-majority region inside the late Ottoman Empire, with a Muslim majority, a significant Orthodox minority, and a settled cross-confessional Albanian identity that had survived more than four centuries of imperial rule.
Who the Cham Albanians are
The Cham Albanians — Çamët in Albanian, singular masculine Çam, feminine Çame — are an Albanian ethnographic subgroup defined by region, dialect, and shared history rather than by religion alone. Both Muslim and Orthodox Chams have historically considered themselves part of the same community.
Language and dialect
Chams speak the Cham dialect (çamërisht) of Albanian, which linguists place inside the broader Tosk dialect group — the southern branch of Albanian, spoken across southern Albania and most of the historic Albanian diaspora in Greece and Italy. Cham preserves several archaic features that have been smoothed away in standard Albanian, including the pronunciation of the rhotic r in specific positions, certain vowel patterns, and a stock of vocabulary tied to the local agricultural and pastoral economy.
The dialect is mutually intelligible with standard Albanian, though older Cham speakers sometimes use forms that younger standard-Albanian speakers find unfamiliar.
Religion
The Cham community was historically majority Muslim, with a significant Orthodox Christian minority, especially in towns like Paramythia and along the southern coast. Religious identity cut across the community without erasing the shared Cham identity — neighboring villages of different confessions shared dialect, surnames, and family ties.
After 1944-1945, the religious composition of the surviving in-region Cham population shifted sharply: most Muslim Chams were expelled, while most Orthodox Chams remained and were absorbed into the Greek state.
Surnames, traditions, and music
Cham surnames pattern with broader southern Albanian naming conventions and often preserve markers of village and clan origin. Traditional Cham music includes a distinctive variant of Albanian iso-polyphony (iso-polifoni) — the multi-voice unaccompanied singing tradition that UNESCO inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. Cham polyphonic songs about the homeland — the rivers, the villages, the events of the 1940s — are central to community memory in Albania and the diaspora.
Traditional dress, dance forms (including the slow circle-dance valle e rëndë), and a deep oral tradition of laments and ballads round out the ethnographic profile.
1913: Chameria becomes part of Greece
Until 1913, Chameria was part of the Ottoman Empire. The borders that finally split it from the rest of the Albanian-speaking world were drawn after the Balkan Wars.
The Treaty of London (May 1913) ended the First Balkan War and created the framework for an independent Albanian state. The detailed border between Albania and Greece was worked out separately through the International Commission that operated between 1913 and 1914, with the Protocol of Florence (December 1913) setting the southern Albanian boundary.
The drawn line placed Chameria inside Greece. The reasoning given by the Great Powers at the time mixed strategic, demographic, and political factors; Albanian and Greek diplomats had argued for different frontiers, and the final compromise left a substantial Albanian-speaking population on the Greek side and a substantial Greek-speaking population (in what was then northern Albanian regions including parts of Korçë and Gjirokastër) on the Albanian side.
For the Chams, the result was clear and difficult: a community whose villages had been Albanian for centuries was now a minority inside a new nation-state whose official language, education system, and administrative structure operated in Greek.
The interwar period: 1913-1940
The roughly three decades between the 1913 annexation and the Second World War were a slow squeeze on Cham community life rather than a single decisive break.
Greek authorities did not immediately impose blanket assimilation. Albanian-language schools operated in some Cham villages in the 1920s, and the League of Nations minority-protection framework following the First World War created some formal space for Albanian-language education and religious life. Greece did not recognize the Albanian Muslims of Chameria as a formally protected minority on the same footing as, for example, the Muslim community of Western Thrace, but a degree of community autonomy persisted in practice.
There were also recurring tensions. The 1923 Lausanne population exchange between Greece and Turkey was, in principle, religion-based — Muslims out of Greece, Orthodox Christians out of Turkey. Greece initially treated the Muslim Chams as falling under the exchange. After Albanian and international protests, the Cham Muslims were exempted from the exchange on the basis that they were ethnically Albanian rather than Turkish, and they remained in Greece. The exemption was won, but the episode established a precedent that the community’s status was unstable.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Albanian-language schools were progressively closed in Chameria, land reform redistributed some Muslim Cham landholdings, and out-migration to Albania and the Americas began in noticeable numbers. By the late 1930s, mainstream Albanian and international sources record a Muslim Cham population in Greece of roughly 18,000-20,000 alongside a smaller Orthodox Cham community.
When Italy invaded Greece from Albanian territory in October 1940, the Cham community was caught between the warring sides — and the political logic that would drive the events of 1944-1945 began to set.
1944-1945: the expulsion
This is the most contested period in modern Cham history, and it is the one most closely associated with the community in the public memory of both countries. The framing here follows mainstream international historiography and notes points of disagreement explicitly.
The basic outline that all major sources agree on: during the Second World War, parts of the Muslim Cham community collaborated with the Italian and German occupation forces in Greece. Other Chams, including some Orthodox Chams and some Muslim Chams, did not. After the Axis withdrawal, the Greek nationalist resistance group EDES (Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Syndesmos), under General Napoleon Zervas, undertook military operations against Cham villages. In two main waves — June 1944 and March 1945 — the Muslim Cham population was driven across the border into Albania.
Tens of thousands of Muslim Chams crossed into Albania during this period; most mainstream estimates place the displaced population at roughly 18,000 to 25,000, though figures vary by source.
The death toll is disputed. Albanian historiography has historically given higher figures (in some cases several thousand killed); Greek historiography and parts of the international literature give lower figures. International scholarship — including the work of historians at Western universities working from EDES records, British Special Operations Executive (SOE) liaison reports, and survivor testimony — generally places the number of killings significantly above zero and significantly below the highest Albanian estimates, while emphasizing that the displacement itself, with the loss of homes, property, and several centuries of settled community life, is the better-documented and less contested fact.
A 1945 Greek special court in Ioannina convicted in absentia a number of Chams for collaboration. Greek scholarship typically frames the 1944-1945 events in the context of wartime collaboration prosecutions; Albanian and much international scholarship frames them as an ethnic expulsion that went beyond individual collaboration cases. Both framings appear in serious historical work, and readers researching family history are likely to encounter both.
What is not in serious dispute: the Albanian-majority demographic presence in Chameria ended in 1944-1945. The Muslim Cham population that had lived in those villages for many centuries was no longer there. Their houses, their lands, their mosques, and their cemeteries were left behind. Their Orthodox Cham neighbors, in most cases, remained.
The Cham Albanian community today
The community that crossed the border in 1944-1945, and the children and grandchildren of that community, form the modern Cham Albanian world.
In Albania
Most expelled Chams settled in southern Albania: in Vlorë, Sarandë, Tirana, and surrounding areas. Estimates of the total Cham-descended population in Albania range from around 170,000 to over 200,000, depending on how the community is defined. Cham identity is preserved through family memory, dialect, intermarriage patterns, organizational life, and an active scholarly and literary tradition that documents village histories and oral testimony.
A political party representing Cham interests, the Party for Justice, Integration and Unity (in Albanian, Partia për Drejtësi, Integrim dhe Unitet — formerly the Çamëria Party), has periodically participated in Albanian national politics. Its role here is referenced as fact; this article does not endorse any party position.
In the United States
The Albanian American Cham community is concentrated in the New York metropolitan area — including parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester, and northern New Jersey — and in Greater Boston, with smaller communities in Detroit, Philadelphia, and other Albanian-American population centers. Cham families came to the United States in two main waves: the pre-1940 chain migration that brought the broader southern Albanian community to the industrial Northeast, and the post-1990 migration after the fall of communism in Albania.
For an Albanian American whose family roots trace back to a village in Thesprotia or Preveza, the Cham connection is often remembered through family names, household dialect, traditional songs, and specific village identifications passed down through the generations.
Elsewhere
Cham diaspora communities also exist in Turkey (descendants of Chams who were exchanged or migrated as Ottoman Muslims), in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy (the post-1990 economic migration), and in smaller numbers across the rest of the Albanian-speaking diaspora.
Unresolved questions
Several questions tied to the 1944-1945 expulsion remain unresolved in international and bilateral terms.
Property records. The houses, lands, and businesses left behind by the expelled Muslim Chams were largely absorbed into the Greek state property system in the post-war years. Albania has periodically raised the property issue diplomatically; in 2009, the Greek Council of State (Symvoulio tis Epikrateias) issued rulings affirming the legal framework that followed the 1944-1945 events. The status of Cham property remains contested between Albania and Greece. NAR does not take a position on property restitution; the issue is mentioned here as a matter of public record.
Citizenship and statelessness. Some Chams who were expelled in 1944-1945 ended up effectively stateless in the immediate post-war years, with neither Greek nor Albanian documents in some cases. The citizenship situation has largely normalized through Albanian citizenship for resident descendants and through naturalization in receiving countries; historic statelessness questions appear in academic and human-rights literature about the period.
Historical memory. The memorialization of the 1944-1945 events differs sharply between Albania and Greece. Albania has commemorated the expulsion publicly; Greek public memory has more often framed the period through the lens of wartime collaboration and the Greek Civil War that followed. International historiography continues to work through both archival records and survivor testimony; serious recent work in English, Greek, and Albanian has narrowed some of the gaps but not all.
These questions are noted here so that readers researching family history understand the live shape of the topic. They are not advocacy.
The Cham legacy: dialect, songs, and iso-polyphony
The Cham community has invested significant effort, particularly since 1991, in documenting and preserving its inherited culture.
Dialect preservation. The Cham dialect of Tosk Albanian is documented in academic work at Albanian universities, in published dictionaries, and in the family transmission of older Chams to their children and grandchildren. The dialect is not officially endangered in the way that Arbëresh or Arvanitika are — its speakers are still numerous and live in Albanian-speaking environments — but it is naturally converging with standard Albanian over generations.
Songs. The Cham song tradition is one of the densest of any Albanian regional repertoire. The repertoire includes laments for specific villages, ballads about the events of the 1940s, and traditional life-cycle songs. Many of these are sung in the broader Albanian iso-polyphonic tradition — the multi-voice unaccompanied form inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 and characteristic of southern Albania broadly. Cham polyphonic groups perform regularly in Albania and in the diaspora.
Cultural and academic institutions. The University of Tirana and other Albanian universities have hosted Cham-studies programming. Cham cultural associations operate in Albania and in the major US Albanian-American population centers. Annual commemorations and cultural festivals take place in Vlorë, Sarandë, Tirana, and in some US cities.
For Albanian Americans whose ancestry traces to Chameria, this is the living infrastructure of identity — not a museum-piece, but an ongoing community.
If your roots trace back to Chameria
The Cham story is one of the deepest and most painful threads in modern Albanian diaspora history. It is also one of the most resilient. Three generations after 1944-1945, the dialect is still spoken, the songs are still sung, the village names are still remembered, and the community is still recognizably Cham — in Vlorë, in Sarandë, in Tirana, in the Bronx, in Boston, and in dozens of smaller communities in between.
If your family roots trace back to a Cham village in Thesprotia or Preveza, you carry one of the Albanian diaspora’s longest historical threads. You can get counted at albanianregistry.org/register.