Turkey

• 1. Introduction

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  Turkey, officially the Republic of Türkiye, is home to over 86 million people. Its capital, Ankara, sits inland on the high central plateau, while Istanbul, the largest city, anchors the economy across two continents. The country occupies mainly Anatolia in West Asia, with a smaller European piece called East Thrace.

  Göbekli Tepe, close to 12,000 years old, rises from this same land. So does the Fertile Crescent, one of the origins of agriculture. The ground here has carried Hattians, Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Seljuks, and Ottomans in turn.

  Why did a Turkic people from the Caspian and Aral steppes come to define Anatolia? How did an empire that ruled from Constantinople become a secular republic in a single year? And why does a nation bridging Asia and Europe sit on some of the most dangerous fault lines on Earth? The answers run from clay tablets to electric cars.

• 2. The Land Of The Turks

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  Turchia, meaning the land of the Turks, began appearing in European texts for Anatolia by the end of the 12th century. In Turkic languages, Turk may mean strong, strength, or in the prime of life. As an ethnonym its etymology is still unknown.

  Middle English usage of Turkye appears in The Book of the Duchess, written between 1369 and 1372, referring to Anatolia or the Ottoman Empire. The modern spelling Turkey dates back to at least 1719. The bird called turkey took its name from the trade of guineafowl from Turkey to England.

  The name Türkiye entered international documents for the first time with the Treaty of Alexandropol in 1920. Upon the proclamation of the republic on the 29th of October 1923, the name Türkiye Cumhuriyeti was adopted. In December 2021, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called for expanded official use of Türkiye, and in May 2022 the United Nations agreed to use it in English. Until then, the official English name remained the Republic of Turkey.

• 3. Layers Of Empire

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  Clay tablets from approximately 2000 BC, found in modern-day Kültepe, open Anatolia's historical record. They belonged to an Assyrian trade colony. The languages then included Hattian, indigenous and with no known modern connections, alongside Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic, described as the oldest written Indo-European languages.

  The Hittite kingdom held Central Anatolia from its capital Hattusa, roughly between 1700 and 1200 BC. Around 750 BC, Phrygia rose with centers at Gordium and modern-day Kayseri. Greeks began migrating to the west coast of Anatolia around 1000 BC, building Miletus, Ephesus, Halicarnassus, Smyrna, and Byzantium. Two of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, stood here.

  After Alexander's victories in 334 BC and 333 BC, the Achaemenid Empire collapsed and Hellenization spread. Rome intervened in the second century BC, and the early Christian Church grew through St Paul's efforts, whose letters from Anatolia comprise the oldest Christian literature. The Council of Nicaea met at Iznik in 325. The Byzantine Empire, centered on Constantinople, endured until that city fell in 1453, though its own citizens called themselves Romans.

• 4. The Turkification Of Anatolia

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  The Proto-Turkic language originated in Central-East Asia, according to historians and linguists. During the 9th and 10th centuries, the Oghuz lived in the Caspian and Aral steppes, then migrated into Iran and Transoxiana, mixing with Iranic-speaking groups and converting to Islam. The Seljuk ruling family came from the Kınık branch of the Oghuz Turks.

  In 1040, the Seljuks defeated the Ghaznavids at the Battle of Dandanaqan. In 1055 they took Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, then established the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum. Anatolia was then a diverse and largely Greek-speaking region.

  Mevlevi Order mystics played a role in the Islamization of Anatolia's diverse peoples. The shift took several centuries through migration, intermarriage, and conversion. A second wave of Turkic migration came in the 13th century as people fled Mongol expansion. The Seljuk sultanate was defeated by the Mongols at the Battle of Köse Dağ in 1243 and broke into Turkish principalities.

• 5. From Beylik To Republic

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  Osman I founded the Ottoman Beylik around Söğüt in the early 14th century. Ottoman chroniclers traced Osman to the Kayı tribe of the Oghuz Turks. Mehmed II completed the conquest of the Byzantine Empire by capturing Constantinople on the 29th of May 1453. During the reigns of Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent, the empire became a global power.

  The Tanzimat reforms, initiated by Mahmud II in 1839, aimed to modernize the state. The Ottoman constitution of 1876 was the first among Muslim states, but short-lived. The Hamidian massacres of Armenians claimed up to 300,000 lives. During World War I, the Three Pashas led the empire into the conflict, and Armenian subjects were deported to Syria in the Armenian genocide, killing an estimated 600,000 to as many as 1.5 million.

  Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who had distinguished himself at the Battle of Gallipoli, led the Turkish War of Independence from 1919 to 1923. The Turkish Parliament abolished the Sultanate on the 1st of November 1922, ending 623 years of Ottoman rule. The Treaty of Lausanne of the 24th of July 1923 secured international recognition. The republic was proclaimed on the 29th of October 1923, and Parliament later granted Kemal the surname Atatürk, meaning Father Turk.

• 6. A Republic In Motion

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  Women gained the right to vote nationally in 1934. İsmet İnönü became the second president after Atatürk's death in 1938, and in 1939 the Republic of Hatay voted by referendum to join Turkey. Turkey stayed neutral through most of World War II, entered on the Allied side on the 23rd of February 1945, and became a charter member of the United Nations that year.

  Turkey joined NATO in 1952 after fighting in the Korean War, becoming a bulwark against Soviet expansion. Military coups or memorandums in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 complicated the transition to a multiparty system. Tansu Çiller became the first female prime minister in 1993.

  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won Turkey's first direct presidential election in 2014. On the 15th of July 2016, an unsuccessful coup attempt tried to oust the government. A 2017 referendum replaced the parliamentary republic with an executive presidential system and abolished the office of prime minister. On the referendum day, the Supreme Electoral Council lifted a rule requiring an official stamp on each ballot, and opposition parties claimed as many as 2.5 million unstamped ballots were accepted. The president is now elected by direct vote for a five-year term, with a 600-member Parliament beside him.

• 7. On The Fault Lines

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  Turkey covers 783,562 square kilometers, with its Asian side making up 97% of the surface and often called Anatolia. The Eastern Anatolia region holds Mount Ararat, the highest point at 5,137 meters, and Lake Van, the largest lake. Eastern Turkey feeds the sources of the Euphrates, Tigris, and Aras rivers.

  Earthquakes strike frequently, and almost the entire population lives with some seismic risk, around 70% in the highest or second-highest zones. The Anatolian plate is bordered by the North Anatolian Fault to the north and the East Anatolian Fault to the east. After the 1999 İzmit and Düzce earthquakes, the North Anatolian Fault was judged one of the most dangerous natural hazards in the country. The 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes were the deadliest in contemporary Turkish history.

  Three of the world's 36 biodiversity hotspots meet here: the Mediterranean, Irano-Anatolian, and Caucasus. The land holds around 197 mammal species, 420 bird species, and 10,150 vascular plant species, with the globally largest concentrations of Cedrus libani. Turkey is highly vulnerable to climate change across nine of ten vulnerability dimensions, against an OECD median of two, and aims for net zero emissions by 2053.

• 8. Building The Future

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  Turkey holds the world's 16th-largest economy by nominal GDP and 11th-largest by PPP. The service sector accounts for 61%, industry for 32%, and agriculture about 7%. By IMF estimates, GDP per capita by PPP is $43,790 in 2025. In 2024, Turkey ranked fourth in the world for international tourist arrivals, drawing 60.6 million foreign visitors.

  Togg is the first all-electric vehicle company of Turkey, joining automakers like TEMSA, Otokar, and BMC. Arçelik ranks among the largest producers of household goods in the world. The Çanakkale 1915 Bridge on the Dardanelles is the longest suspension bridge in the world. Turkey produced 43.8% of its electricity from renewable sources in 2019, and gas production began in 2023 in the Sakarya field, set to supply about 30% of domestic natural gas.

  Research and development spending rose from 0.47% of GDP in 2000 to 1.40% in 2023. Turkey launched its National Technology Initiative in 2019, and in 2024 and 2025 its first domestically made electron accelerator, quantum computer, and communication satellite became operational. With 22 UNESCO World Heritage Sites and a Nobel Prize in Literature won by Orhan Pamuk in 2006, the country that began at Göbekli Tepe now reaches for the Middle Corridor linking Asia and Europe.