Turkey

The republic built deliberately on the ruins of an empire, on land that has been the hinge between Europe and Asia throughout recorded history. Anatolia held Hittites, Greeks, Romans and Byzantines before Turkic peoples arrived from Central Asia after Manzikert in 1071. The Ottoman state grew from a small frontier principality into an empire that took Constantinople in 1453 and ruled the Balkans, the Levant, Egypt and Arabia for four centuries, governing religious communities through the millet system. Decline, defeat in the First World War and Allied partition plans were answered by Mustafa Kemal's war of independence, and the republic proclaimed in 1923 then remade the country by decree: the caliphate abolished, the alphabet changed from Arabic to Latin script in a matter of months, religious institutions placed under state control, and a national identity defined as Turkish - which is the origin of the long conflict with Kurdish claims. The Armenian genocide of 1915 and after, in which around a million and a half people were killed, remains officially denied. Turkey joined NATO in 1952. Istanbul spans two continents. Ankara is the capital. The country has about eighty-five million people, straddling Europe and Asia. Turkish is written in a Latin alphabet designed for it in 1928. Twenty-one of its sites are World Heritage listed, including Gobekli Tepe, the oldest known monumental complex on earth. The country sits on major fault lines and the 2023 earthquake killed over fifty thousand people. It hosts more refugees than any other country, most of them Syrian. The Bosphorus and Dardanelles are among the most strategically contested waterways in the world.

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