important as the Aegean coast has a number of beaches, and there is also the potential for winter tourism activities in the Rhodopi mountains, the natural border with Bulgaria, which are covered by dense forest. Politics The Muslim minority of Thrace are Greek citizens of diverse ethnic origins and is recognised as religious minority in accordance with the Treaty of Lausanne which Greece has signed with Turkey, and along with the Greek Constitution, enshrines the fundamental rights of the Turks and other ethnic groups of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace and the obligations towards them. The Greek government is not referring to the Muslim minority by a specific ethnic background, as it includes Turks, Pomaks and Roma Muslims. The minority was exempted from the 1922-1923 Exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey and was granted special rights within the framework of the Treaty of Lausanne, such as religious freedom and education in the Turkish language. The estimated numbers of the minority's constituent ethnic groups are according to a document of the Greek Consulate in Berlin, the following: total number of Muslim minority is approximately 120,000 Turkish: ~35% Pomaks: ~35% Roma people: ~15% ethnic Greek Muslims: ~15% Turkey, a signatory state of the Lausanne Treaty, initially claimed the whole of the Muslim minority to be strictly an ethnic Turkish minority even though it consists of multiple ethnic groups. However, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, during his historic December 7, 2017 visit to Greece as President of Turkey, acknowledged for the first time the multi-ethnic nature of the Muslim minority. Historical demographics The last censuses which asked about ethnicity were held in the transitional period before the region became part of Greece. A number of estimates and censuses during the 1912-1920 period gave the following results about the ethnic distribution of the area that would become known as Western Thrace: The Pomak population depending on the source was sometimes counted together with the Turks (Muslims) following the Ottoman system of classifying people according to religion, while in other occasions was specified separately. According to the Bulgarian view, they are considered "Bulgarian Muslims" and an integral part of the Bulgarian nation. By the Bulgarian census in 1919, held on the request of the Entente, of the population of Western Thrace was 219,723 of whom: Turks 35.4% (77,726 Muslims), Bulgarians 46.3% (101,766 - 81,457 Christians and 20 309 Muslims), Greeks 14.8% (32,553 Christians), Jews 1.4% (3,066) Armenians