Xanthi mufti Ahmet Mete passes away at age of 57

Ahmet Mete, the elected mufti (Muslim official) of Xanthi (Iskece) in Greece's Western Thrace region, died at the age of 57 on Thursday.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan extended his condolences to Mete's family and the Turkish minority living in Western Thrace.

Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu hailed Mete as a person who "devoted his life to the just struggle of the Western Thrace Turkish minority."

"His services will always be remembered fondly," he said on Twitter.

Turkish Parliament Speaker Mustafa Şentop also expressed "great sadness" over Mete's death.

Born in 1965 in Yanioren, a village in Xanthi, Mete studied in Türkiye and Saudi Arabia at undergraduate and graduate schools before returning to Western Thrace.

He served as a Quran teacher and imam under the region's former mufti Mehmet Emin Ağa.

Western Thrace is home to a Muslim Turkish minority of around 150,000 people, where muftis, who are Muslim scholars and legal experts, have legal jurisdiction to decide on family and inheritance matters in the local community.

The election of muftis by Muslims in Greece was regulated in the 1913 Treaty of Athens with the Ottoman Empire and was later included in Greek law. Greece, however, annulled the law in 1991 and started appointing muftis itself.

The majority of Muslim Turks in the cities of Komotini (Gumulcine) and Xanthi do not recognize the appointed muftis and instead elect their own, who are not recognized by the Greek state.