Turkey (1923- ) is what remains of the Ottoman Empire, which once ruled the Middle East. It lies in Anatolia, the land between the Black and Mediterranean seas.
It is not the only country with Turks. To the east there are others: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. But Turkey is by far the largest and richest of these.
Turkey stands between two worlds: Muslim and Western.
It is a Muslim country yet its people wear Western clothes, write with Roman letters and take part in parliamentary elections. Religion is kept out of government and even the women are not allowed to cover their heads in public like they do in other Muslim countries.
Turkey belongs to NATO, the Western military alliance. This means the second largest army in NATO is Muslim.
But Turkey is not part of the European Union (EU). It is not for want of trying. For years it was kept out because it had a bad record on human rights and its army had too much power in government.
Now that Turkey is changing its ways, the EU has begun talks for it to join, maybe in 2013. But the talks are going badly and Sarkozy, the president of France, is finding excuses to slow them down.
Even though Europe is no longer strongly Christian, many seem to be against Turkey joining the EU simply because it is Muslim. Turkey may seem Western on the outside but it is still Muslim on the inside.
Although Turkey has long been a friend of America, the two do not agree on Iraq: partly because Turkey is becoming more of a democracy and the people are against what America is doing in Iraq; but also because America turns a blind eye to Kurdish fighters crossing into Turkey from Iraq.
Turkey killed more than a half million Armenians in the early 1900s and later fought against Kurds in eastern Turkey. It was trying to make everyone in Turkey into Turks.
Anatolia was once a Christian land full of Greek towns and farms. It was the heart of the Byzantine empire. Between 1000 and 1500 the Turks uprooted and destroyed all of that. They marched on Constantinople and overthrew it, giving it a new name, Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire was born.
When the empire reached its height in the late 1600s it ruled the Arab world, Greece, Serbia, Hungary, Armenia and other nearby countries. Its armies got as far as the gates of Vienna. Two hundred years later the empire began to fall apart. In the early 1900s the First World War delivered the death blow.
After the war in the 1920s Ataturk made Turkey more Western.
Turkey stayed out of the Second World War. It still had one of the largest and best armies in the world, but it did not have the tanks and fighter planes it took to fight a war. But it did join America against Russia in the Cold War that followed.
– Abagond, 2007.
See also:
- Seeing Turkey – I saw Turkey about a year later, in 2008.
- The Armenian genocide
- A Guide to Turks
- Muslim
- The West
- Iraq
- American Empire
- The Arab world
- parliament
- Byzantine empire
- Sarkozy
I am a Turkish person from Izmir/Turkiye. My grandmother’s father fought in World War I, against British Army in Canakkale,against he had been fought 10 years, from the age 17 to the age of 27. When he got back to his town in
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I am a Turkish person from Izmir/Turkiye. My grandmother’s father fought in World War I, against British(New Zealand) Army in Canakkale, against Greece, and against Britishers again in Yemen. He had been fought 10 years, from the age 17 to the age of 27. When he got back to his town, he saw that the half of the family was massacred by the enemy. I am not going to blame anyone here, because this was a goddamn war. I am so sorry that the people died for it. In our history classes, I have been told that the remains and Islamic amulets which were belong to eastern Turkish people were found in that so-called Armenian graves. If you look at the well-known recent history, you can see that 45 Turkish diplomats+people were killed by Armenian ASALA organization. This is the very well-known fact. And if you read ‘Farewell Anatolia’ from Dido Soturiou, or the classical ‘Zorba’ which was written by Nikos Kazantakis, great writers from Greece, you can comprehend the relationship between that Muslim Turk and Greek inhabitants who were living together since that war…And please do not forget that defending own country is a supreme mission with utmost respect. And Turkiye did it in WW1. But attacking to a country without a proven reason and for more money, the soldiers of the invader can never fight like the others who fights for their country…
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tolkien_87@hotmail.com
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Mustafa:
I had to delete your comment written in Turkish. I had no idea what you were saying, so that was the safest course. If you want to write it in English, please do add it.
Thanks.
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In uniting Turkish identity, Turkey prefers to draw a veil over parts of its history. Outside of Turkey, there has been discussion about the Armenian Genocide and also the situation with the Kurds, but inside the country, those subjects are not always particularly safe to talk about. Some historical episodes are discussed far, far less, such as the Genocide of the Pontian Greeks.
These mass killings were orchestrated also in the early part of the 20th century. At the time the Ottomans had lost control over Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaristan (Bulgaria) and feared losing control over Pontus — or the Black Sea region, which was a wealthy area, known for the cleverness and dynamism of its people, with their own language and original culture from Byzantine times. The Pontians also exerted considerable influence over the Turkish economy. The Young Turks had spoken openly about ridding their nation of this “Greek”, Christian element and those plans were put into place when the Young Turks came to power with the slogan “Turkey for the Turks”.
When World War 1 began, the Pontians suddenly gained the reputation of being untrustworthy and unpatriotic. The men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Some ran away into the mountains and formed guerilla troops, but the remaining Greek families were locked into churches and schools and burned. All women and girls (of any age) were raped before being murdered. The babies were dashed against walls. The male population of towns such as Mertzifunda, Ordu, Tripoli, Kerasounda, among others, were destroyed. Clergymen lynched, etc. Numbers of casualities vary, but conservative estimates point to around 400,000 for Pontians.
The destruction of this population was part of the larger genocide of Greeks in Anatolia and that figure is close to one million, although I have heard that is a low count and 1.5 million killings is closer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
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