Turkish ethnicity

Turkish ethnicity concerns the ethnic landscape of the Republic of Türkiye. The country has a varied ethnic makeup. Over 85% of the 85 million people who live here are said to be of ‘Turkish’ descent, though this is more complex than it originally seems and many Turks have mixed ethnic heritage, notably strains of Greek ancestry owing to the extensive colonization of western Turkey (Anatolia) by the Greeks since ancient times. Balkan and Italian DNA is also common amongst Turkish people, often stretching back to the days of the Roman Empire. There are significant ethnic minorities in the east of the country, particularly the Kurds, who constitute several million people in eastern Turkey and who have repeatedly agitated for their own nation state since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Some estimates indicate that as many as 20% of the Turkish people may have Kurdish ancestry, though census and ethnic records for modern Turkey are notoriously sparse. There are also significant communities of Armenians and Georgians in the east and north-east of the country, while many people in southern Turkey have Arab ancestry owing to the common Islamic heritage of the region.

Turkish history

The main excavation site at Göbekli Tepe

Turkey is one of the most storied countries in the world. It was here in the shadow of the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey that Çatalhöyük was settled as a remarkably egalitarian Neolithic town around 7000 BCE. Two millennia earlier Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest megalithic stone monument, had been built not far to the east. As the Bronze Age arrived, Turkey, or Asia Minor as it was known in ancient times, was home to the powerful Hittite Empire which waged war with New Kingdom Egypt for control of the Levant, while the fabled city of Troy was almost certainly found somewhere along the western coast of Turkey, a sign of the early colonization of western Turkey by the Greeks. This pattern continued through the Iron Age as major Greek cities emerged along the coastline, notably Miletus, one of the great centers of early Greek philosophy in the sixth century BCE. Asia Minor remained central to the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean through the Hellenistic and Roman eras and two of the seven wonders of the ancient world were located here, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus and the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Perhaps it was not surprising that when Emperor Constantine decided to build a new capital for the Eastern Roman Empire in the early fourth century CE, he chose to do so at the Bosporus, the crossing point over the Sea of Marmara between Europe and Asia Minor and from the Aegean Sea into the Black Sea. He modestly called his new capital Constantinople, but we know it as Istanbul today.

The mosque of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul today. It was originally built as a Christian cathedral. The minarets (i.e. the four pointy towers) were added after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and repurposed the church as a mosque

Constantinople remained the capital of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire for centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. However, Asia Minor was largely overrun in the middle of the seventh century by the Muslim Arabs as they burst out of the Arabian Desert to conquer the Middle East, North Africa and parts of southern Europe. Constantinople was even besieged on several occasions, notably between 674 CE and 678 CE and again in 717 CE. However, the city would not meet its conquerors for many centuries to come. When it did it was not in the guise of the Arabs, but newcomers from far to the east. The Turks originated in north-eastern Asia in what is now the vast Siberia region of Russia east of the Ural Mountains. They most likely began migrating in great numbers south and south-westwards owing to the increasingly inhospitable environment in their homeland during the Late Antique Ice Age of the sixth and seventh centuries CE. By the ninth and tenth centuries they were present in significant numbers in Transoxiana, the region between the Caspian Sea and the Himalayas, and the Levant. The First Crusade was preached at the end of the eleventh century in large part owing to the threat posed by the Turks to the Byzantine Empire and Christian access to the Holy Land. By the twelfth century the Turks were largely in control of Asia Minor and modern-day Turkey, but it was not until 1453 that the rising Ottoman Empire, which had been founded in the early fourteenth century by a Turkic warlord named Osman, was able to finally conquer Constantinople under Sultan Mehmed II, ‘the Conqueror’. It duly became the capital of a Turkish Ottoman Empire which expanded to control Asia Minor, most of the Middle East, the Balkans, North Africa and even parts of the Crimea and Caucasus at its height in the seventeenth century. Throughout all of this Asia Minor continued to be a melting pot of different ethnic groups and cultures and the idea that the Turkish people today are descended entirely from the Turks who came out of north-east Asia in late antiquity is a severe simplification.

The Ottoman Empire reached its peak in the 1680s when Sultan Mehmed IV nearly conquered Vienna and moved into Central Europe. However, the siege of that city was relieved by a Polish army in defense of Christendom and the Ottomans quickly began to decline as a power relative to the major European states in the course of the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire was ‘the sick man of Europe’, with Austria-Hungary and Russia looking to eclipse it in the Balkans. By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, huge swathes of its empire in North Africa, the Balkans and the Caucasus had been lost already. The decision to join the war on the side of the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the conflict and their collective defeat spelled the end of the Ottoman Empire. In its place, following a lengthy civil war, the new Republic of Türkiye was established in 1923.

Turkish culture

Mosaics and Islamic geometric art from the interior of the Ottoman Topkapi Palace

While Turkish culture still retains elements of its rich history and ties to Greece, Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean, it is a nation which is primarily influenced today by its Islamic heritage and ties to the Arab world since the seventh century CE. Although technically a secular state since the 1920s, over 99% of the population is officially listed as Muslim and the country has become more religious since a drift away from secularism began in the 1980s. Turkish art and architecture are greatly influenced by Arab and Muslim traditions inherited from the height of the Arab Caliphate between the eighth and eleventh centuries, particularly geometric art. The country’s cuisine is directly inherited from Ottoman times, with a fusion of Turkish and Persian elements and an emphasis on kebabs, mezes, yogurt and pastries, the latter being both savory and sweet such as baklava. Football is the country’s most popular sport, though the most traditional is Yağlı güreş, a type of native wrestling which boasts the oldest sporting competition in the world, having been held at Edirne since the mid-fourteenth century. Overall Turkish culture today is a hybrid of modern influences and ancient Ottoman and Islamic heritage.

Turkish languages

Turkish is the official language of Turkey. It is spoken by over 95% of the population, with 77 million people in the country speaking it as their first language. Some nine million people speak Northern Kurdish, the most common dialect of Kurdish. Again these are primarily found in the east of the country. Over four million Turkish citizens speak the North Levantine strand of Arabic. As the name suggests, many of these speakers are found in south-eastern Turkey where the country borders the Levant region. There are a great many other languages which are spoken by several hundred thousand people in Turkey. For instance, there are over 350,000 Bulgarian speakers in Turkey, an unsurprising fact given the extensive border with Bulgaria in the European part of Turkey and the proximity of Istanbul to Bulgaria. Other minority tongues include Armenian, Chechen, Bosnian and Persian. It is estimated that between 15% and 20% of the population have a basic level of English, with higher percentages pertaining in cities like Istanbul and Ankara.

Explore more about ethnicity estimates

• MyHeritage DNA at MyHeritage
• Ethnicities around the world at MyHeritage
• What Is My Ethnicity? How MyHeritage Estimates Ethnicities at MyHeritage Knowledge Base
• Where's My Ethnicity?!: Why An Ethnicity Might Not Show Up In Your DNA (and How To Find Evidence Of It Anyway) at MyHeritage Knowledge Base

References

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