Sabiha, a middle-aged woman dressed in an ankle length black robe and pale grey headscarf, offers a tray with small cups of Turkish coffee to her foreign visitors, seated on a sofa. Then she and her family kneel on the carpet to resume a conversation held partly in Greek, partly in Turkish.

The town of Echinos, where Sabiha runs a grocery shop, is a commercial centre for a cluster of mountain villages close to Greece’s border with Bulgaria. An overwhelming majority of the population are Pomaks, members of a Muslim minority whose homes were inaccessible to foreigners until a decade ago.