Turkey

The flag of Turkey

Turkey is a country which stands at the crossroads between Europe and Asia and between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. For millennia it has been home to some of the most advanced civilizations in the world and has a storied past. The fabled city of Troy, for instance, is believed to have stood on the west coast of Turkey. In the fourth century the Romans built the city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) to stand over the passage from Europe to Asia and for centuries it was the greatest city in the world. During the tenth and eleventh centuries the region was settled extensively by the Turks, an Asiatic people who had migrated vast distances from north-eastern Asia since the fifth or sixth centuries. It is from these people, who ruled an extensive empire in central Asia between the sixth and eighth centuries before migrating further westwards, that the modern name Turkey derives.

History of Turkey

Turkey has one of the most complex histories of any nation in the world. It is, for instance, home to the oldest known man-made monumental structure still extant today, the temple of Göbekli Tepe, which was built around 10,000 BCE. While the Neolithic/Chalcolithic settlement of Catalhöyük, an advanced egalitarian society, existed in Anatolia between roughly 7500 BCE and 5700 BCE. Later the Hittite Empire emerged here at the height of the Bronze Age and was the major rival of the Egyptian Empire for dominance of much of the Fertile Crescent before the Late Bronze Age collapse.

Depiction of Thales at the Baths of the Seven Sages

Already in the Bronze Age, the coast of western Turkey had become home to many Greek colonies and cities. The region developed as such for centuries to come, with a high degree of civilizational development. The city of Miletus, for instance, is where Greek philosophy and science emerged in the teachings of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes in the sixth century BCE. The first recognizably modern coinage system, the Lydian Lion Coinage, was developed by the King of Lydia in Turkey around the same time. Thereafter, the region became the border zone in the conflict between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. As a result, Turkey went through successive periods of being dominated by the Persians, the Macedonian Greeks, various Hellenistic powers such as the Pontic Greeks, and finally the Romans from the first century BCE. Under Roman rule the province of Asia, broadly referring to western Turkey, was one of the wealthiest parts of the whole empire.

Turkey’s modern history might be said to begin in the eleventh century. It was then that the Turks, an Asiatic people who had migrated from north-eastern Asia over a period of centuries, established the Seljuk Empire out of the former provinces of the Byzantine Empire in Turkey and regions further to the east. This was followed in centuries to come by the emergence of a new Turkic empire, the Ottoman Empire, in Anatolia. It expanded from the fourteenth century onwards to conquer most of the Eastern Mediterranean and construct a vast empire. At its height the Ottoman Empire stretched from Algeria in the west, to Iraq in the east, and from Hungary in the north, south to Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. Ottoman rule would last for a half a millennium, but eventually began to disintegrate in the nineteenth century, collapsing altogether at the end of the First World War.

Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the Turkish Revolution, or Turkish War of Independence, as Turkish nationalists like Kemal Ataturk sought to establish a new, secular Turkey which would not be dominated by Islam and old Turkish traditions. In the aftermath of the War of Independence, Turkey, with its modern-day borders, emerged. Ataturk would rule it as a virtual dictator between 1923 and his death in 1938, a controversial figure who is regarded as the founding father of modern Turkey. Since then the country has had a conflicted history, with several military coups over the decades and a shifting drift between being an Islamic state and a secular state. Turkey has also sought to join the European Union, but its efforts have been viewed askance in recent times owing to the perception of the growing dictatorial powers of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been in power in one form or another since 2003.

Geography of Turkey

Turkey is a large country, most of which lies in Asia, but with a small enclave in Europe in the south-east of the Balkans where the city of Istanbul stands over the passage into the Black Sea. The country is broadly divisible into three major geographical regions. Western Turkey contains the more prime low-lying land in the Anatolian plateau and the coastal regions of the Aegean Sea. This gives way in the north and east to the Pontic Mountains, the Taurus Mountains, and the Nur Mountains. In the far east of the country, the land is dominated by the Eastern Anatolian montane steppe, a mixture of savannah and dry, desert-like shrub-land. Over one-in-six people of Turkey’s 85 million inhabitants live in the Istanbul metropolitan area. There are numerous other large cities, notably the capital Ankara with over five million people, while Izmir, Bursa, and Antalya all have in excess of two and a half million people. With urbanization levels of 77%, Turkey is one of the world’s most urbanized large nations.  

Genealogical research in Turkey

Skyline of modern day Istanbul

The earliest extensive national census available for Turkey dates to 1831 when the Ottomans undertook a census of their entire empire. Further censuses were attempted in the early 1880s and the mid-1900s, while the first national census for modern-day Turkey was carried out in 1927. Additionally, there are a range of other sources available for various parts of Turkey, notably municipal records pertaining to Istanbul. Records are held in numerous archives; more modern records of the twentieth century are housed in the Directorate of Republican Archives and the Directorate of Documentation in Ankara. Older records, though, of a kind which are more valuable for family history and genealogical studies, are located in the Directorate of Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.

See also

• Ottoman Empire
• Balkan Wars
• Greco-Turkish War
• Treaty of Lausanne

Explore more about Turkey

• Greece, Asia Minor Refugees, 1914-1923 at MyHeritage
• Greece’s Top 5 Types of Genealogy Records at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Turkey-Greece population exchange still painful for those yearning for a lost past at Middle East Eye

References

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