Anatolia’s republic still bridges Black Sea and Mediterranean
Turkey, officially Türkiye, occupies mainly Anatolian West Asia with East Thrace in Southeast Europe, touching the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and neighbours from Greece and Bulgaria to Iran and Syria. Late Paleolithic humans began a sequence through Hattians, Hittites, Hellenization after Alexander, and Ottoman centuries into the republic.
Göbekli Tepe, close to 12,000 years old, and Çatalhöyük rank among the world's oldest Neolithic sites, and Anatolian farmers began spreading into Europe roughly 9,000 years ago. The first written records are clay tablets from an Assyrian trading colony at Kültepe around 2000 BC. Hittite, Luwian and Palaic are the oldest written Indo-European languages, and the Hittites ruled from Hattusa between about 1700 and 1200 BC. Phrygia later rose at Gordium, while Urartu had its capital near Lake Van.
Greek cities such as Miletus, Ephesus, Halicarnassus, Smyrna and Byzantium shaped Archaic Greek culture, and two of the Seven Wonders, the Temple of Artemis and the Mausoleum, stood here. Cyrus pushed in from 547 BC before Alexander toppled Persian rule in 334 and 333 BC. Celtic Galatians settled the centre in the third century BC, and Rome inherited Pergamon, while Paul's letters written here are the oldest Christian literature and the Council of Nicaea met at Iznik in 325.
Seljuk Turks arrived in the eleventh century, the Ottomans began uniting principalities in 1299, and Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453. During the First World War the Ottoman government committed genocides against Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. After the War of Independence, Atatürk proclaimed the republic on 29 October 1923.
European texts used Turchia for Anatolia by the late 1100s, and the bird got its English name from guineafowl shipped to England via Turkey. In 2022 the UN agreed to use Türkiye. Home to over 86 million people, the country has the 16th-largest economy by nominal GDP, NATO's second-largest armed forces, and ranks as the world's fourth most visited country.
Source: Turkey
