Turkification

• 1. Introduction

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  Turkification is the term a Turkish defense minister reached for in 2008. Vecdi Gönül asked whether Turkey could still be the same nation if Greeks still lived along the Aegean or Armenians still filled its towns. His question carried its own answer: removing those populations had helped build the country he served. Behind that remark sits a process stretching back more than a thousand years, from Central Asian steppe migrations to laws passed in the Turkish parliament. It describes how peoples, cities, and even churches came to carry Turkic language, religion, or identity in place of what came before.

  How did regions filled with Iranian speakers, Byzantine Greeks, and Armenian nobles come to speak Turkish and answer to a Turkish state? Why did the Ottoman elite itself resist being called Turks for centuries? And what happens to the meaning of a word like Türk once migration, intermarriage, and modern genetics all pull at its edges? The chapters ahead follow this shift from Central Asia's ancient migrations to the laws of the modern Turkish republic.

• 2. Origins Of A Word

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  Before the 20th century, this same shift across Anatolian, Balkan, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern regions carried a different name: Ottomanization. Turkish nationalism rose in the 20th century, and "Turkification" began replacing "Ottomanization" in common use. The distinction still matters: Turkic describes a broad linguistic family, while this narrower use of Turkification points specifically toward Ottoman and later Turkish state policy toward ethnic minorities.

  Since the 1300s, in the late Byzantine era, Greek texts used the words "εκτουρκισμός" or "τούρκεμα," meaning literally "becoming a Turk." The term applied to more than people. Greek writers also used it for cities conquered by Turkish forces or for churches converted into mosques. Its verb form, "τουρκεύω," could mean either becoming Turkish or becoming Muslim.

  The very earliest instance of this shift, though, happened far from Anatolia, among the Iranian-speaking peoples of Central Asia.

• 3. Central Asia's Vanishing Iranians

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  Central Asia's native inhabitants were Iranian peoples centuries before the region became mostly Turkic. By the 6th century AD, migration of Turkic tribes out of Inner Asia had begun triggering a language shift among them. That shift reached Kashgar within a few hundred years: by 750, the Qarluq Turks had completed its Turkification, converting the population to Islam in the same process. The Qarluqs were ancestors of the Karakhanids, who carried this same Islamizing pattern forward.

  Khwarezm, a Central Asian oasis region, lost its native Iranian language entirely as this process advanced. Today's Central Asia is the product of a process that began at least 1,400 years ago and now includes mostly Turkic ethnic groups. Tajiks are the exception: this Persian-speaking population is considered the only ethnic group to survive Turkification in Central Asia intact. Outside Tajikistan and the Tajik-majority parts of Uzbekistan, the process accelerated further with the Mongol conquest of Central Asia.

  Mahmud al-Kashgari, writing about the region, described the people living between Bukhara and Samarkand as Turkified Sogdians, calling them "Sogdak." Despite their clear Iranian ethnicity, some arguments have tried to deny Tajiks' Iranian identity. These arguments instead link Tajiks to Arabs raised in Iran, or to Turks who lost their language under Persian cultural influence.

  A similar contest over origins would later play out further west, in the Turkic settlements of Azerbaijan.

• 4. Azerbaijan's Layered Conquest

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  Turkic settlements began appearing in what is now Azerbaijan during the Seljuq period, and the pace of change accelerated from there. Oghuz Turks migrated in from present-day Turkmenistan, a movement linguists can trace through the linguistic similarities they left behind. That migration remained heavy through the Mongol era, since Turkic soldiers made up the bulk of the Ilkhanate's troops.

  The Safavid period pushed Azerbaijan further toward a Turkic character, largely through the Qizilbash. This association of Turkmen nomadic tribes formed the backbone of the entire Safavid Empire. Soviet scholars have argued that Azerbaijan's Turkification was largely complete by the end of the Ilkhanate period.

  Turkish scholar Faruk Sumer identified three distinct periods of this process: Seljuq, Mongol, and Post-Mongol, the last covering the Qara Qoyunlu, Aq Qoyunlu, and Safavid dynasties. In the first two periods, Oghuz Turkic tribes either advanced into or were driven toward Anatolia and Arran. In the final period, Turkic groups already settled in Iran were joined by Anatolian Turks migrating back into Iran. These groups were mostly Oghuz, with smaller numbers of Uyghur, Qipchaq, Qarluq, and Turkified Mongols, marking the final stage of Turkification.

  Anatolia itself, the destination and origin of so many of these Turkic tribes, had its own far longer road to Turkification.

• 5. Anatolia's Demographic Turn

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  Ancient Anatolia was home to Anatolian peoples, Armenians, Persians, Hurrians, Greeks, Cimmerians, Galatians, Colchians, Iberians, Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, and Corduenes. Greek colonists settled the western, northern, and southern coasts during Anatolia's Mycenaean and Classical periods. Hellenization then spread through the interior over centuries, aided by Koine Greek's role as the political lingua franca and later the main liturgical language. By the 5th century, the native people of Asia Minor spoke Greek and practiced Christianity almost universally.

  These Greek-speaking Christians called themselves Romans, or Rhomaioi, not Byzantines. They made up the bulk of the empire's Greek-speaking population for a thousand years. That span ran from the 5th century until the Byzantine state's fall in the 15th century. Along the Black Sea coast, this population eventually formed its own state, the Empire of Trebizond, which gave rise to the modern Pontic Greek people. Near the Persian border to the east, other native languages held on, including Armenian, Assyrian Aramaic, and Kurdish.

  In 1018, after the First Bulgarian Empire fell, much of its army was resettled into Eastern Anatolia. This fit a routine Byzantine practice of moving populations to impose religious uniformity and quell rebellions. The Byzantines were especially eager to assimilate their large Armenian population. In the 11th century, Armenian nobles were removed from their lands and resettled across western Anatolia. Prominent Armenian families were absorbed into Byzantine nobility, producing numerous Byzantine generals and emperors of Armenian descent. This resettlement spread Armenian speakers deep into Asia Minor. It also stripped the eastern frontier of local military leadership, opening a path for Turkish invaders.

  War between Turks and Byzantines broke out in the eleventh century, killing many in Asia Minor while enslaving or displacing others. Turkic nomads moved their herds into the resulting depopulated land. Even so, Christian populations remained an overwhelming majority as late as 50 years after the Battle of Manzikert. Turkish rulers seemed aware of their own small numbers, and many went to lengths to disarm their Christian subjects. Chronicler Matthew of Edessa recorded evidence that Turks kidnapped Christian children and raised them as Turks.

  Intermarriage between Turks and the Greek, Armenian, and Georgian natives of Anatolia was not unheard of, mostly between Turkish men and Christian women. Their children, known as Mixovarvaroi, were raised as Turks and as Muslims, though some later defected back to the Byzantines. These unions likely played a role in Anatolia's eventual shift from a Greek, Christian population to a Turkish, Muslim one.

  Ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi counted 200,000 Turkmen tents around Denizli, 30,000 around Bolu, and 100,000 around Kastamonu. A Latin source from the end of the 12th century put the nomadic tent count at 100,000 across the Denizli and Isparta regions. These figures describe pastoralists whose exact numbers historians still debate.

  Ottoman tax archives recorded about 872,610 households across the provinces of Anatolia, Karaman, Dulkadir, and Rûm during the 1520s and 1530s. Of these, 160,564 households were nomadic, while the rest were settled. The province of Anatolia itself, covering only its western and northwestern reaches, held the largest nomadic population, at 77,268 households. Between 1570 and 1580, 220,217 of the region's 1,360,474 households were nomadic. That meant at least 20 percent of Anatolia was still nomadic through the 16th century. In that same window, the Anatolia province's nomadic households grew to 116,219.

  Devshirme, literally "collecting" in Turkish, was also known as the blood tax. Ottoman officials used it to press second or third sons of Christian villagers in the Balkans, the empire's Rum millet, into military training as Janissaries. Recruits learned Turkish and converted to Islam, chosen for military or civil service among the empire's ablest children. Sultan Murad I started the practice to counter the growing power of the Turkish nobility, even though it violated Islamic law. By 1648, the practice had ended. An attempt to revive it in 1703 was blocked by the very Ottoman officials who wanted its posts, and the practice was abolished early in Ahmet III's reign.

  That same drive to reshape Anatolia's population would resurface under the Young Turks and a sociologist named Ziya Gökalp.

• 6. The Young Turks' New Nationalism

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  The late Ottoman government sought "a core identity with a single Turkish religion, language, history, tradition, culture and set of customs." That goal replaced older Ottoman traditions, which had not tried to assimilate different religious or ethnic groups. Turks, Arabs, Albanians, Bosniaks, Greeks, Persians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Kurds, Zazas, Circassians, Assyrians, Jews, and Laz people had all lived under that older, more tolerant system. Turkish nationalists began claiming that only Turks were reliably loyal to the state. Even so, support for Turkification stayed limited within the empire itself.

  Ziya Gökalp, a sociologist and political activist, was one of Turkification's main supporters. He believed a modern state had to become culturally, religiously, and nationally homogeneous, with Turkishness serving as its unifying virtue. Following that belief to its conclusion, he argued the state needed to purge national groups that threatened a Turkish nation-state's integrity.

  Article 18 of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 declared Turkish the empire's sole official language, open only to Turkish speakers in government jobs. After the Young Turks took power in 1909, Turkification policy gained new force, pushing Turkish into administration, courts, and education in Arabic-majority areas. A second aim was loosening ties between Turks and non-Turkish subjects by purging Arabic influence from the Turkish language itself. Arabs responded by defending Arabic's superiority, calling Turkish a "mongrel" language shaped by heavy Persian and Arabic borrowing. Turkish teachers replaced Arabic teachers in schools, and the Ottoman postal service switched its administration to Turkish.

  Rashid Rida was among those who publicly backed Arabic over Turkish, even as supporters of Turkification faced accusations of harming Islam. Before the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, Syrian reformer Tahrir al-Jazairi had already persuaded Midhat Pasha to make Arabic the language of instruction in state schools. That changed again in 1885, when Sultan Abdul Hamid II shifted instruction back to Turkish. One historian of Arab nationalism wrote that "the Unionists introduced a grave provocation by opposing the Arab language and adopting a policy of Turkification." Scholars still disagree on how much Turkification actually fed Arab nationalism.

  British ambassador Gerard Lowther compared the policy to "pounding non-Turkish elements in a Turkish mortar." Another European observer warned the CUP would reduce "the various races and regions of the empire to one dead level of Turkish uniformity." Historian Rifa'at Ali Abou-El-Haj wrote that Ottoman and Islamic elements were "abandoned in favor of Turkism, a more potent device based on ethnic identity."

  Historian Uğur Üngör wrote that "Muslim Kurds and Sephardi Jews were considered slightly more 'Turkifiable' than others" under these nationalist-era policies. He described the era's "social engineering" as showing "little regard for proclaimed and real loyalties." These policies, part of a broader forced-assimilation campaign, culminated in the Armenian and Assyrian genocides.

  During World War I, the Ottoman government ran orphanages across the empire holding Armenian, Kurdish, and Turkish children together. Armenian orphans in these orphanages were given Arabic and Turkish names. In 1916, a Turkification campaign began that aimed to resettle whole Kurdish tribes so they would not exceed 10 percent of any local population. Talaat Pasha ordered Kurds in the eastern regions relocated westward, and he demanded reports on whether they were Turkifying and getting along with Turkish neighbors. Non-Kurdish immigrants from Greece, Albania, Bosnia, and Bulgaria were meant to resettle the Diyarbakır province the Kurds had left. By October 1918, as the Ottoman army retreated from Lebanon, a Father Sarlout sent Turkish and Kurdish orphans to Damascus while keeping Armenian orphans in Antoura. He then began reversing the Turkification process by having the Armenian orphans recall their original names. Various scholars believe at least two million Turks today have at least one Armenian grandparent.

  Around 1.5 million Ottoman Greeks remained in the empire after losses of 550,000 during World War I. Nearly all of the rest, 1,250,000 people outside Constantinople, fled or were forced into Greece in 1923 under the League of Nations population exchange that followed the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. The lingual Turkification of Greek speakers in 19th-century Anatolia is well documented. Historian Speros Vryonis traces the Karamanlides to an earlier, partial Turkification during the Ottoman period. Fewer than 300,000 Armenians remained of a prewar 1.2 million, and fewer than 100,000 of 400,000 Assyrians remained.

  Historian Talin Suciyan later described what this loss meant for those who remained, a description the new Turkish Republic's own laws would only sharpen.

• 7. Forging The Republic

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  The Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 displaced many of the city's Salonikan Jews, and the Burning of Smyrna brought similar destruction elsewhere. Turkish and Greek nation-states rebuilt both places afterward in ways that erased their non-Turkish and non-Hellenistic past. Historian Talin Suciyan called the effect "de-identification, in which a person loses all references to his or her own grandparents, socialisation, culture and history." Suciyan added that such people could not "fully become part of the society, culture, and politics of the imposed system." State-organized discrimination continued afterward, including files kept on citizens of non-Muslim descent. Ottoman Turkish classical music was banned from the school curriculum, and Ottoman archival documents were sold to Bulgaria as recycled paper. Sunday replaced Friday, the traditional Muslim rest day, as Turkey's official day of rest. Political elites in the early Republic split between a modernist agenda that erased all traces of the Ottoman past and moderate nationalists who preferred a softer transition.

  Nationalism and secularism were two founding principles when the modern Republic of Turkey was established in 1923. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, its early leader, aimed to build a nation-state, or Ulus, from the Turkish remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey's Ministry of National Education defined the "Turkish People," in 2008, as "those who protect and promote the moral, spiritual, cultural and humanistic values of the Turkish Nation." One stated goal of the new state was ensuring "the domination of Turkish ethnic identity in every aspect of social life." That reached from street language to school curricula, and from trade to the resettlement of citizens in particular regions.

  Article 12 of the Turkish Constitution of 1924 barred citizens who could not speak and read Turkish from serving in parliament. A December 1925 law demanded that employees at every company wear clothing of Turkish production. A Report for Reform in the East, released in September 1925, called for banning non-Turkish languages.

  On the 18th of March 1926, a Civil Servants Law took effect, restricting civil service jobs to Turks and explicitly excluding Armenians and Greeks. On the 28th of May 1927, business correspondence was required to use Turkish. Foreign insurance companies also had to employ Turks, except for their director and deputy director. Law 1164, passed in September 1927, created regional Inspectorates-General, called Umumi Müfettişlikler, where Turkification policy applied most intensely; these bodies lasted until 1952.

  A campaign called "Citizen, Speak Turkish," started by law students and backed by the government, pushed non-Turkish speakers to use Turkish in public. This ran through the 1930s, and some municipalities fined those who spoke other languages. The Law 2007 of the 11th of June 1932 reserved professions such as law, construction, and hairdressing for Turkish citizens. It also barred foreigners from opening shops in rural areas, a restriction that hit Greeks hardest.

  The 1934 Resettlement Law, also called Law no. 2510, set out principles for forced and collective resettlement meant to assimilate non-Turkish minorities. The Surname Law that followed banned surnames carrying foreign connotations. Many Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds were forced to adopt Turkish-style names ending in "-oğlu." That replaced endings such as "yan," "of," "ef," "viç," "poulos," "aki," "zade," and "shvili," which marked non-Turkish origins.

  Starting in 1932, the Diyanet required that the Adhan and the Salah be recited in Turkish rather than Arabic. Imams who recited them in Arabic were prosecuted under Article 526 of the Turkish Criminal Code for opposing public order. A 1941 amendment made refusal punishable by up to 3 months in prison or a fine between 10 and 300 Turkish Lira. After the Democrat Party won power in 1950, prayers in Arabic were permitted again from the 17th of June that year.

  Non-Muslims, mainly Jews, Greeks, and Armenians, were conscripted into the 20 Classes working battalions during 1941-1942 and set to difficult labor. The Varlık Vergisi, or wealth tax, followed in 1942, officially meant to fund defense spending in case Turkey entered World War II. Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Levantines, who controlled much of the economy, suffered the tax most severely, with Armenians taxed heaviest of all. Historian Klaus Kreiser wrote that President İnönü's real aim was evicting foreigners from control of the Turkish economy and shifting it to Turks.

  Article 16 of the 1972 Population Law barred parents from giving newborns names that contradicted national culture. A separate initiative renamed animal species to strip out any reference to Armenia or Kurdistan from their Latin names. Confiscated Armenian properties across Turkey, seized under both Ottoman and Turkish governments, are described as part of the same Turkification of the country's economy. Geographical names of Armenian, Greek, Laz, Slavic, Kurdish, Assyrian, or Arabic origin were also replaced with Turkish ones. The word "Armenia" itself was banned from the press, schoolbooks, and government use in 1880, replaced with "Anatolia" or "Kurdistan." Assyrians have since protested the continued Turkification of historically Aramaic place names, framing it as an ongoing erasure of their identity.

  Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code took effect on the 1st of June 2005. It made insulting Turkey, the Turkish nation, or government institutions a crime. It was introduced as part of penal reforms tied to Turkey's push to open European Union membership talks. Turkification also reached classrooms directly: minority schools were required to teach mandatory Turkish classes, and Turkish became the required language of economic institutions.

  None of these laws, though, settled a more basic question: who actually counted as a Türk in the first place.

• 8. What Türk Really Means

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  Ottoman elites called themselves Ottomans, not Turks, since the word "Turk" was mostly tied to Turkmen tribesmen in their minds. Like other Central Asian Turkic peoples, they identified first through tribal descent and only second through the dynastic civilization, or devlet, they ruled. Because the House of Osman claimed Kayı ancestry, other Turkic peoples looked comparatively alien to the ruling dynasty. A shared modern notion of "Turk" as one inter-ethnic label would have made little sense to them.

  In the late 19th century, "Turk" was still a slur aimed at poor Yörük-Turkoman farmers and pastoralists of humble origin. European ideas of nationalism reached the Ottoman elite around the same time. Once it became clear that Anatolia's Turkish speakers were Ottoman rule's most loyal supporters, the word "Türk" took on a far more positive meaning.

  A similar imprecision surrounds "Kürt," or "Kurd," a label western Anatolians often apply to anyone living east of Adana. That includes people who speak only Turkish and have no other claim to Kurdish identity. Like other ethnic categories used in Turkey, "Türk" has never carried one uniform meaning.

  Since 1982, Article 66 of the Turkish Constitution has defined a "Turk" as anyone "bound to the Turkish state through the bond of citizenship." Centrist Turkish politicians have also tried recasting the category in more multicultural terms, framing a Türk as simply a citizen of the Republic of Turkey.

  An estimated 10.7 million people lived across Asia Minor and the Balkans, including Greece, in 600 AD. That figure fell to roughly 8 million in Asia Minor alone during the High Middle Ages, between 950 and 1348. By around 1204, Asia Minor's population is estimated at 6 million, including 3 million within Seljuk territory.

  Turkish genomic variation, alongside that of several other Western Asian populations, looks most similar to South European populations such as southern Italians. Ancient DNA spanning the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age shows that Western Asian genomes, Turkish ones included, were shaped heavily by early agricultural populations in the region. Later population movements, including those of Turkic speakers, added to that mix. Turkey's first, and as of 2017 only, whole-genome sequencing study was completed in 2014.

  Central Asian populations' genetic variation remains "poorly characterized," and researchers note Western Asian populations may also be "closely related to populations in the east." A 2011 review proposed that "small-scale, irregular punctuated migration events" drove the language and culture shifts "among Anatolia's diverse autochthonous inhabitants."