Who are the Chams?

During the occupation (1941-1944), the majority of Chams sided with the Axis forces  with irredentist purposes, for the creation of a "Great Albania".

As a result of the atrocities committed by the Chams at that time (1941-1943) in co-operation with the occupation authorities, the local Christian population either migrated or resisted through the creation of small resistance groups, or joined the larger resistance movements of EAM and EDES.

Towards the end of the war, a very limited number of formerly Axis-allied Chams joined ELAS.

On 17-18 August 1944, the battle of Menina was held, which was the most important given by the resistance forces against the German occupiers in Epirus.

There, the united forces of EDES defeated the Germans. Among the victims were 86 dead and several prisoners among whom 9 Chams.

After the end of the war, the entire Muslim population of Chams fled to Albania because of their collaboration with both the Italian and German occupation authorities.

Most settled in Albania and a few in Turkey and the United States.

The Stalinist regime of the People's Republic of Albania granted them houses designed to dilute the compact presence in areas inhabited by Greek populations (North Epirus).

At the same time, about 8,000 Greeks who lived in Albania, under pressure, fled to Greece during that period (1945-1946).

In Greece, of the approximately 20,000 Chams that existed in the pre-war period in Thesprotia, according to the 1951 census, only 127 remained.

On May 23, 1945, the Special Court of Ioannina's Assistant Court sentenced 1,930 Chams in abstentia, definitively closing the way for their repatriation.

There is no "Cham" issue for Greece. Albania continues to raise the issue of theirpropertiies, confiscated after their  sentence for high treason.