They had been forced to leave Crete when the island was captured by the Kingdom of Greece from the Ottoman Empire during the 1897-98 Greco-Turkish War, and resettled by Sultan 'Abdu'l-Hamid II here and other coastal areas of the Levant and even Libya.
In addition to the Greek Orthodox Christian population there are also about 8,000 Greek-speaking Muslims of Cretan origin in Al-Hamidiyah, Syria and 7,000 people of Greek Muslim descent in Tripoli, Lebanon.