El-Hamidiyeh is a town on the Syrian coast. The town was founded in a very short time on the direct orders of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamit II around 1897, to serve as a refuge for the Greek-speaking Muslim Cretan community, forced to leave Crete during the 1897–98 Greco-Turkish War and resettled by the Sultan in Hamidiyeh and other coastal areas of the Levant and as far as Libya. The majority still speak Cretan Greek in their daily lives. According to the Syria Central Bureau of Statistics, el-Hamidiyeh had a population of 7,404 in the 2004 census.