Turkey has protested Greece’s decision to suspend eight minority primary schools in Western Thrace for the 2026-27 academic year, calling low enrollment a pretext for further reducing the region’s minority education network.
The schools are among 47 units placed in suspension across Eastern Macedonia and Thrace. The same regional order covers regular kindergartens and primary schools as well as special-education units. Thirty-nine of the 47 are not minority schools.
The eight minority schools are in Didymoteicho in Evros; Avato and Vafeika in Xanthi; and Ano Drosini, Deilina, Omiriko, Mischos and Chloe in Rodopi. Their operation is suspended for one academic year rather than formally abolished, according to the decision published in the Government Gazette.
Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesperson Öncü Keçeli said the decision would leave 76 minority primary schools operating in Western Thrace. In its July 19 statement, Ankara described insufficient pupil numbers as a “pretext,” accused Greece of placing new obstacles on first-grade enrollment at the 1st Minority Primary School of Xanthi and called the measures part of a systematic erosion of minority educational rights.
The Turkish statement did not explain what those obstacles were. The allegation appears to refer to a parliamentary question filed on June 23 by Xanthi MP Hüseyin Zeybek.
Citing complaints from parents, Zeybek said two children who are Greek citizens had been denied first-grade enrollment at a minority primary school because one parent was a foreign national. According to the question, the other parent was a Greek citizen and member of the minority, while the foreign-national parent was also Muslim.
Zeybek asked the Education Ministry to identify any law or administrative rule requiring both parents to be Greek citizens or members of the minority. The parliamentary question presents his account; it does not establish that the refusal was unlawful. No ministry response was listed in the parliamentary record when this article was prepared.
What the Greek decision says
The Greek order cites the registration tables submitted by minority schools for 2026-27 and recommendations from the primary education directorates in Evros, Xanthi and Rodopi. It does not publish the number of registered pupils at each school.
That format is not unusual. A 2025-26 decision for the Peloponnese suspended 22 kindergartens and 15 primary schools because they had no registrations or had failed to reach the required minimum number of pupils.
The Peloponnese order cited pupil-population data and submissions from the five local primary education directorates but did not give the enrollment total for each school.
The absence of school-by-school figures therefore does not make the Western Thrace order exceptional, although it prevents an independent assessment of each case from the Government Gazette alone.
The broader decision is consistent with the stated demographic explanation. Minority schools were reviewed alongside 39 other units rather than through a separate process applying only to the Muslim Minority.
The process can also be reversed. The same order lifts the suspension of the Minority Primary School of Kechros in Rodopi after what it describes as a sufficient number of enrollment and attendance applications. The school is due to reopen for 2026-27, while six minority schools suspended in earlier years will remain inactive.
Those facts do not prove that suspension was the best option in every village. They do show that enrollment is being used as an operating criterion across the regional school system and that a minority school can reopen when registrations rise.
Where will the pupils go?
Children from a suspended school are normally reassigned through the geographic planning of the local education directorate.
Under Greece’s school-transport rules, regional authorities provide free transportation for eligible pupils attending public schools.
The framework allows the use of travel passes, municipal or regional vehicles and contracted services. It sets a standard minimum distance of 1.2 kilometers for primary pupils in the main transport categories and permits officials to consider educational needs, distance and other factors that make a route difficult.
The suspension order does not identify the receiving schools, the number of affected children, the distances they will travel or the routes that will operate when classes begin.
A transfer to a regular public school would not preserve the same program. According to the European Union’s Eurydice education network, minority primary schools in Thrace use both Greek and Turkish as subjects and languages of instruction.
A family that wants to remain within the minority system may therefore need access to a more distant school. For children in remote or mountainous communities, the question is not simply whether another classroom exists. It is whether an equivalent school can be reached reliably and without an excessive daily journey.
Greek law allows regional authorities to arrange free transportation, but the suspension order does not show whether suitable routes have been planned or contracted for the pupils affected by these eight cases.
Why Turkey focuses on the number of schools
The Turkish statement does not address how pupils will be reassigned or transported after the suspensions. Its focus is the continued reduction in the number of operating minority schools.
The July 19 statement says the latest decision will leave 76 minority primary schools in Western Thrace and presents the decline as part of a systematic restriction of minority educational rights.
That has also been Turkey’s position in earlier disputes. Ankara has repeatedly emphasized the fall in the total number of schools rather than limiting its objections to the circumstances of an individual village.
Under that interpretation, reassigning the pupils does not fully answer the objection. Children may continue attending school, but another village loses a bilingual minority institution. Turkey therefore treats the cumulative decline in the number of schools as a minority-rights issue, even when an individual suspension has a demographic basis.
The current statement does not demonstrate that the eight minority schools were subjected to different enrollment criteria from the 39 non-minority units covered by the same order. Its case rests instead on the long-term contraction of the network and the position that schools protected under the Treaty of Lausanne should receive greater protection from ordinary consolidation rules.
Turkey’s earlier Imvros comparison
The current statement does not compare the Western Thrace decision with Turkey’s treatment of Greek schools. Ankara has made that comparison explicitly in the past.
In a January 2021 Foreign Ministry statement, Turkey said it had opened schools on Imvros (Gökçeada) for only four Greek Orthodox pupils while Greece continued to suspend minority schools in Western Thrace.
Ankara presented the contrast, together with the decline in the number of Western Thrace minority schools, as evidence of different approaches to minority education.
The comparison remains visible today. A January 2026 briefing from the Turkish district education directorate lists the private Greek primary school on Imvros as operating four classes for eight pupils. The same document records four pupils in the Greek kindergarten, 14 in the middle school and 17 in the high school.
The comparison is relevant but not exact.
Turkey treats its recognized Greek, Armenian, and Jewish minority schools as private community institutions under state supervision. The European Commission’s 2025 Türkiye report states that minority schools received no public funding.
Greece’s minority schools operate under a different financial structure. Eurydice states that the financial support and educational measures applied to Greek public schools are also extended to minority schools in Thrace.
Turkey has therefore kept a Greek primary school operating with eight pupils, but the administrative and financial comparison is not one-to-one. A small private community school does not place the same obligations on the Turkish state as staffing and supporting a school within Greece’s publicly financed minority-education system.
The Imvros example gives Ankara a factual basis for arguing that very small minority schools can be preserved when the state and community consider them necessary. It does not establish that Greece’s latest suspensions were discriminatory.
The practical test
The available record is consistent with low enrollment as the administrative basis for the suspensions. The inclusion of 39 non-minority units in the same order and the reopening of Kechros both weigh against the claim that the eight schools were selected solely because of their minority status.
Turkey’s protest nevertheless raises a question that enrollment totals alone cannot settle: how far consolidation can proceed before the remaining minority-school network becomes difficult for families to use.
Families affected by the suspension of any public school in Greece should be told where their children will be assigned, how far they will travel and what transportation will be available.
In these eight cases, there is an additional question: whether the receiving schools offer the bilingual minority curriculum or whether families that want to remain within that system will face longer journeys.
Publishing those details would allow the suspensions to be judged not only as an administrative response to falling enrollment, but also by how they affect pupils’ daily access to education.