Türkiye (Turkey)Türkiye

Anatolia is one of the oldest settled landscapes on earth. Göbekli Tepe near Şanlıurfa, a ring of carved stone pillars raised around 9500 BC, predates farming in the region and has upset older ideas about which came first, temples or villages. Çatalhöyük near Konya, a dense town of mud-brick houses entered through the roof, was occupied from about 7100 BC. By the second millennium BC the Hittites ruled central Anatolia from Hattuşa, writing on clay tablets and signing one of the earliest surviving peace treaties, with Egypt, after the battle of Kadesh.

From about 1000 BC the Aegean coast filled with Greek cities, Ephesus, Miletus, Smyrna and Halicarnassus among them, while Phrygians, Lydians, Lycians and Carians held the interior and the south. The Lydians of Sardis are credited with the first coins. Persia conquered the region in the sixth century BC, Alexander took it in 334 BC, and Rome absorbed it over the following two centuries. Under Rome the province of Asia was among the richest in the empire, which is why Ephesus, Perge, Aspendos and Aphrodisias are so large.

In 330 Constantine refounded the Greek town of Byzantium as Constantinople, capital of the eastern Roman Empire. Justinian's Hagia Sophia, finished in 537, remained the largest church in Christendom for almost a thousand years. The empire we now call Byzantine survived Arab sieges, iconoclasm and the Fourth Crusade's sack of the city in 1204, but it was steadily shrinking when Turkic groups arrived from Central Asia. The Seljuk victory at Manzikert in 1071 opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement, and the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, based at Konya, built the caravanserais that still line the old trade roads.

The Ottomans began as one of many small Turkish principalities in north-west Anatolia around 1300. They took Bursa in 1326, crossed into Europe, made Edirne a capital and in 1453, under Mehmed II, captured Constantinople. Under Süleyman the Magnificent (1520–66) the empire reached from Hungary to Yemen and from Algeria to the Caspian, and the architect Sinan built the mosques that define the Istanbul skyline. Decline was slow and uneven; nineteenth-century reforms (the Tanzimat) modernised law, army and schools while the empire lost the Balkans, Egypt and North Africa piece by piece.

The First World War ended the empire. It brought the defence of Gallipoli in 1915, where a young officer called Mustafa Kemal made his name, and the deportations and mass killings of Armenians in 1915–16, which most historians and many states recognise as genocide and which Türkiye officially disputes. After the Allied occupation, Kemal led the War of Independence (1919–22), and the Republic of Turkey was declared in Ankara on 29 October 1923. The 1923 population exchange with Greece moved about 1.2 million Orthodox Christians and some 400,000 Muslims across the Aegean.

Atatürk's reforms in the 1920s and 1930s abolished the caliphate, replaced Islamic law with European codes, switched to the Latin alphabet, gave women the vote and required surnames. Multi-party politics began in 1950, interrupted by military coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 and a 'postmodern' intervention in 1997. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP has governed since 2002, first with EU-oriented reforms, later with a presidential system (2018) and a tighter grip on media and courts after the failed coup of July 2016. The country today is a NATO member, a regional power and home to one of the largest refugee populations in the world.

About 85 million people live in Türkiye, and about 16 million of them in Istanbul alone. The large majority identify as Turks, a national identity built by the Republic from Anatolian Muslims of many origins: Balkan and Caucasian refugees of the nineteenth century, Crimean Tatars, Circassians, Laz, Georgians and Arabs as well as descendants of the Turkic settlers. Kurds, concentrated in the south-east but present in every big city, are the largest minority at perhaps 15–20 per cent. Armenian, Greek (Rum), Jewish and Syriac Christian communities remain, much smaller than a century ago, mostly in Istanbul and the Tur Abdin plateau near Mardin.

The Kurdish question has shaped modern politics. Kurdish language and identity were suppressed for decades, and the PKK's armed insurgency from 1984 cost around 40,000 lives, mostly in the south-east. Restrictions eased in the 2000s, with Kurdish-language broadcasting and schools, then peace talks collapsed in 2015 and fighting returned to some towns. In May 2025 the PKK announced it would dissolve and disarm after a call from its jailed founder Abdullah Öcalan; how far that process goes is still being negotiated.

Family and neighbourhood are strong. Adult children often live with parents until marriage, elders are addressed with titles (abla for an older sister or woman, abi for an older brother or man, amca and teyze for uncles and aunties), and hospitality is a matter of pride: a guest is offered tea, food and often a bed. Mahalle, the neighbourhood, still means something in cities, with its own mosque, bakery, grocer and coffee house.

Society is split along several lines that visitors notice without always understanding. Secular, often Western-oriented city dwellers and pious, conservative voters live in different neighbourhoods, watch different channels and vote for different parties. The coast and the big western cities lean secular; central Anatolia leans conservative; the south-east votes largely for pro-Kurdish parties. The headscarf, long banned in universities and public offices, was a flashpoint until those bans were lifted in the 2010s.

Türkiye has hosted the world's largest registered refugee population for most of the past decade, mainly Syrians who fled the civil war from 2011. After the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, several hundred thousand returned, but millions remained in 2026, and their presence is a heated political subject. Economic pressure, with inflation above 50 per cent for long stretches since 2021, has sharpened that debate and pushed many young graduates to look for work abroad.

Most Turks are Muslim, the majority Sunni of the Hanafi school, and religion shapes the rhythm of the day through the call to prayer five times from every minaret. The Republic was founded as secular, but secularism here (laiklik) means state control of religion rather than separation: the Directorate of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet, employs the imams, writes the Friday sermon and runs about 90,000 mosques. Its budget and influence have grown sharply since the 2000s.

Alevis, perhaps 10–20 per cent of the population, practise a distinct tradition that honours Ali and blends Shia, Sufi and older Anatolian elements. They worship in cemevi rather than mosques, men and women together, with music and the semah dance, and they have long campaigned for official recognition. Many Alevis are strongly secular in politics, and the Sivas massacre of 1993, when 33 intellectuals died in a hotel fire set by a mob, remains a defining memory.

Sufism runs deep in Anatolian religion even though Atatürk closed the Sufi lodges (tekke) in 1925. The Mevlevi order, founded by followers of the thirteenth-century poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi in Konya, is known abroad for its whirling ceremony, the sema, now performed in restored lodges and at the Konya festival every December. Other orders, and religious communities such as the followers of Said Nursi, remain influential in society and politics; the Gülen movement, once allied with the government, was outlawed after the 2016 coup attempt.

Christianity has two thousand years of history here. Paul came from Tarsus, the seven churches of the Book of Revelation were in western Anatolia, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church still has its seat in Istanbul's Fener district. Cappadocia's rock-cut churches, painted from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, are among the most visited Christian sites in the region. Istanbul's Jewish community descends largely from Sephardic Jews who arrived after the expulsion from Spain in 1492.

For visitors, religion shows up in practical ways. Mosques are open between prayers, with dress rules and shoes off. Ramadan changes the evening: restaurants fill at sunset for iftar, and drummers walk the streets before dawn to wake people for sahur. Conversions of famous buildings are sensitive; Hagia Sophia, a museum from 1934, became a mosque again in 2020, and Chora (Kariye) followed in 2024, both still open to visitors outside prayer times.

Ottoman architecture peaked with Mimar Sinan (about 1490–1588), chief architect to three sultans, who designed or supervised hundreds of buildings. His signature is the great central dome carried on half-domes and buttresses, a response to Hagia Sophia that aimed to exceed it. The Şehzade and Süleymaniye mosques in Istanbul show his development; the Selimiye in Edirne, finished in 1575, he called his masterpiece. A mosque complex (külliye) typically bundled a school, hospital, soup kitchen, bath and tombs around the prayer hall.

Tiles are the other Ottoman signature. Workshops at İznik produced glazed pottery and wall tiles from the late fifteenth century, reaching their height in the sixteenth with a tomato red that later potters could not reproduce. The Rüstem Pasha Mosque and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and the Topkapı harem are covered in them. Kütahya took over production when İznik declined, and both towns sell modern tiles today.

Calligraphy was the highest art in Ottoman culture, alongside illumination, paper marbling (ebru) and miniature painting. The imperial monogram, the tuğra, turned the sultan's name into a design. Carpets and flat-woven kilims come from village and nomadic traditions across Anatolia, each region with its own motifs and dyes; the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul holds some of the oldest surviving examples.

Music ranges from Ottoman classical makam music and Sufi ney (reed flute) to regional folk traditions played on the bağlama lute, the Black Sea kemençe fiddle and the zurna and davul of weddings. Arabesk, the melancholy urban pop of migrants in the 1970s and 1980s, still fills taxi radios; Turkish pop and rock took off from the 1990s. On screen, Turkish television dramas (dizi) are exported to more than 150 countries and are among the most watched series in the Middle East, the Balkans and Latin America.

Literature moved from Ottoman court poetry and the Sufi verse of Yunus Emre to modern prose after the alphabet change. Nazım Hikmet, the great modern poet, died in exile; Yaşar Kemal wrote epic novels of the Çukurova plain; Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006 with novels set largely in Istanbul. Writers and journalists have often faced prosecution for what they published, which is part of why many contemporary authors, Elif Shafak among them, write partly from abroad.

Turkish cooking draws on nomadic Central Asia (yoghurt, dumplings, grilled meat), the Byzantine and Mediterranean world (olive oil, fish, vegetables), Persia and the Arab lands (rice, spices, sweets) and the Balkans. The Ottoman palace kitchens at Topkapı employed hundreds of cooks, and dishes refined there, stuffed vegetables, pilafs and pastries, spread through the empire's cities. Many neighbouring cuisines share names for the same dishes, which is a frequent source of friendly and not-so-friendly argument.

The everyday meal is simpler than the restaurant version. Lokantas, or esnaf lokantası (tradesmen's canteens), cook stews, soups, rice and vegetable dishes each morning and sell them from steam trays until they run out. A typical order is lentil soup, a meat and vegetable stew, rice or bulgur pilaf, salad and bread, with ayran to drink. Breakfast, kahvaltı, is a social event at weekends, spread across the table with cheeses, olives, honey and clotted cream, eggs, jams and endless tea.

Regional food is a matter of local pride. Gaziantep is known for baklava and lahmacun, Adana and Urfa for their kebabs, Kayseri for mantı and pastırma, the Black Sea for anchovies and corn bread, the Aegean for wild greens and olive oil dishes. UNESCO lists Gaziantep and Hatay as creative cities of gastronomy. Antakya in Hatay, with its Arab-influenced mezes and künefe, was largely destroyed in the 2023 earthquakes, and its cooks now work partly from other cities while the old town is rebuilt.

Tea is the national drink, grown on the rainy Black Sea slopes around Rize and served in tulip glasses from a two-level pot. Turkish coffee, boiled in a cezve and served with its grounds, is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list, as is the culture around it: fortune-telling from the cup, and the old custom of a prospective bride serving coffee to her future in-laws. Rakı, an aniseed spirit drunk with water and ice alongside meze and fish, is the drink of the meyhane, the tavern where a long evening of small plates, music and conversation is the point.

Sweets are serious. Baklava should be crisp and light, with pistachios from Gaziantep; lokum (Turkish delight) was refined in Istanbul by confectioners such as Hacı Bekir in the eighteenth century; milk puddings such as sütlaç and kazandibi are sold in muhallebici shops. Dondurma, the stretchy ice cream thickened with salep and mastic, comes with a performance from the vendor. Street food ties it together: simit at breakfast, midye dolma (stuffed mussels) at night, kumpir baked potatoes in Ortaköy and fish sandwiches on the Golden Horn.

Turkish belongs to the Turkic family, whose speakers stretch from the Balkans to Siberia; Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek and Kazakh are relatives, and speakers of Turkish and Azerbaijani can understand each other fairly well. It is agglutinative: suffixes stack onto a root in a fixed order, so one long word can carry what English says in a sentence. Vowel harmony means the suffixes change their vowels to match the root, which gives the language its rolling sound.

Ottoman Turkish was written in Arabic script and borrowed heavily from Arabic and Persian, so the court language was hard for ordinary people to follow. In November 1928 the Republic switched to a Latin alphabet designed for Turkish sounds, and Atatürk toured the country with a blackboard to teach it. Within months, newspapers and books had to use the new script; the old one became unreadable to most people within a generation, cutting easy access to Ottoman writing.

The Turkish Language Association, founded in 1932, set out to replace Arabic and Persian words with Turkish coinages or revived old Turkic words. Many stuck, and today's Turkish differs strongly from the language of 1920; older and more religious speakers still use more of the Ottoman vocabulary. French gave modern words such as kuaför (hairdresser) and otobüs; English is the source of new borrowings.

For visitors, the Latin script is the big advantage: signs are readable once you learn a few letters. C sounds like English j, ç like ch, ş like sh, the dotless ı is a short neutral vowel, and ğ lengthens the vowel before it. Kurdish (mostly Kurmanji and Zazaki) is widely spoken in the south-east and in big-city neighbourhoods, and Arabic along the Syrian border. Politeness formulas matter: 'kolay gelsin' to someone working, 'geçmiş olsun' to someone ill, 'afiyet olsun' to someone eating.

The year runs on two calendars. Civic holidays follow the Gregorian calendar and the story of the Republic: 23 April for the first parliament, 19 May for the start of the War of Independence, 30 August for victory in 1922, 29 October for the Republic. Religious holidays follow the Islamic lunar calendar and move about eleven days earlier each year. On 10 November at 09:05, the moment of Atatürk's death in 1938, sirens sound and traffic stops for a minute of silence.

The two Bayrams are the big family holidays. Ramazan Bayramı, also called Şeker Bayramı (the sugar feast), ends the month of fasting with three days of visits, new clothes and sweets for children, who kiss elders' hands and are given sweets or small coins. Kurban Bayramı, the feast of sacrifice, lasts four days; families who can afford it have a sheep or a share of a cow slaughtered and give much of the meat to neighbours and the poor. The government often bridges Bayrams into nine-day holidays, and tens of millions travel.

Other festivals are regional: Hıdırellez on 5–6 May celebrates the arrival of spring with wishes tied to rose bushes; Nevruz on 21 March is the Kurdish and Alevi New Year, marked with fires; the Mevlana commemoration in Konya each December centres on the anniversary of Rumi's death, 17 December, which his followers call his wedding night with God. Oil wrestling at Kırkpınar near Edirne has been held every summer for more than 650 years, according to tradition.

The economy is large and diverse: cars and white goods for Europe, textiles, steel, construction firms working across Africa and Central Asia, hazelnuts (Türkiye grows most of the world's supply), and tourism, which set records above 60 million foreign visitors a year. Since 2018 the lira has lost most of its value against the euro and dollar, and inflation peaked near 85 per cent in late 2022; tighter policy from 2023 slowed it, but prices still rise sharply every year.

For visitors, inflation means that price lists go out of date quickly, that museums and hotels increasingly quote in euros, and that locals feel the squeeze even when a trip feels cheap. Wages have not kept pace, so a restaurant bill that seems modest to a visitor can be a real expense for a Turkish family. Tipping in cash, paying the listed price in markets rather than bargaining over small sums, and eating in local lokantas all put money where it helps.