[22] Reference to Muslim Albanian communities as Turco-Albanian is made for those that settled the Peloponnese in order to spread Islam from c. 1715 until after 1770, as part of official Ottoman policy.
[24][25][26] In 1779 the Ottoman army finally managed to drive those groups out of Peloponnese, while the remaining ones were either killed by local villagers or found refuge in Muslim Albanian communities in Lala and Vardounia.
[29] As a result, local Greek traditions in Epirus since the late 18th century mention frequent raids and looting by "Turko-Albanians" or "Albanian" bands.
[7][9][10] As with the term "Turk",[16] the expression (rendered also as Turco-Albanian)[1] was employed by some writers mainly in nineteenth and early twentieth century[citation needed] Western European literature regarding Muslim Albanian populations.
[1][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50] At the beginning of the 1880s the Greek press openly used the term "Turco-Albanian brigands" to incite hate speech and to associate Albanian irredentists with "Turkish anti-Greek propaganda".
[56] The term Turco-Albanian was also used by both British intelligence and the German army for Muslim Albanian Chams during World War II and it was borrowed from Greek usage.
[57] Moreover, in Greek, similar composite ethnographic terms that also reveal the ethnic or religious background of the specific communities have also been used, such as Turco-Cretans (or Τουρκοκρήτες, Tourkokrites), and Turco-Cypriots (or Τουρκοκύπριοι, Tourkokiprioi).
[3] Amongst the wider Greek-speaking population, until the interwar period of the twentieth century, the term Arvanitis (plural: Arvanites) was used to describe an Albanian speaker, regardless of their religious affiliations, including Islam.