History of turkey

National name: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti
President: Abdullah Gul (2007)
Prime Minister: Recep Tayyip Erdogan (2003)
Monetary unit: Turkish lira (YTL)
Languages: Turkish (official), Kurdish, Dimli, Azeri, Kabardian
Ethnicity/race: Turkish 80%, Kurdish 20% (estimated)
Religions: Islam (mostly Sunni) 99.8%, other 0.2% (mostly Christians and Jews)

Culture of Turkey

The culture of Turkeyis a diverse one, derived from various elements of the Ottoman Empire, European, and the Islamic traditions. The nation was modernized primarily by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. As he transformed a religion-driven former Ottoman Empire into a modern nation-state with a very strong separation of state and religion, there was a corresponding increase in the methods of artistic expression. During the firstyears of the republic, the government invested a large amount of resources into fine arts such as paintings, sculpture and architecture. This was done as both a process of creating a cultural identity. Because of the different historical factors playing an important role in defining a Turkish identity, the culture of Turkey is an interesting combination of clear efforts to be "modern”.

PeopleThe question "Who are the Turks?" does not have an easy answer. At the turn of the 20th century the Ottoman Empire was a multinational state extending over three continents. This page limits its discussion to the borders of the Republic of Turkey (founded in 1923). The location of the pictures are given with the name of the city or ass a region, in case the source does not mention it.Turkish culture has undergone profound changes over the last century. Today, Turkey may be the only country that contains every extreme of Eastern and Western culture (along with many compromises and fusions between the two). The Ottoman system was a multi-ethnic state that enabled people within it not to mix with each other retain separate ethnic and religious identities within the empire.Upon the fall of the empire after World War I the Turkish Republic adapted a unitary approach, which forced all the different cultures within its borders to mix with each other with the aim of producing "Turkish" national and cultural identity. This mixing, instead of producing cultural homogenization, instead resulted in many shades of grey as the traditional Muslim cultures of Anatolia collidedwith (or had imposed upon them) the cosmopolitan modernity of Istanbul and the wider West. Thus, Turkish culture in many ways represents a band that bridges past and present, East and West.

Geography
Turkey is at the northeast end of the Mediterranean Sea in southeast Europe and southwest Asia. To the north is the Black Sea and to the west is the Aegean Sea. Its neighbors are Greece andBulgaria to the west, Russia, Ukraine, and Romania to the north and northwest (through the Black Sea), Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran to the east, and Syria and Iraq to the south. The Dardanelles, the Sea of Mamara, and the Bosporus divide the country. Turkey in Europe comprises an area about equal to the state of Massachusetts. Turkey in Asia is about the size of Texas. Its center is atreeless plateau rimmed by mountains.
Government
Republican parliamentary democracy.
History
Anatolia (Turkey in Asia) was occupied in about 1900 B.C. by the Indo-European Hittites and, after the Hittite empire's collapse in 1200 B.C., by Phrygians and Lydians. The Persian Empire occupied the area in the 6th century B.C., giving way to the Roman Empire, then later the Byzantine Empire. TheOttoman Turks first appeared in the early 13th century, subjugating Turkish and Mongol bands pressing against the eastern borders of Byzantium and making the Christian Balkan states their vassals. They gradually spread through the Near East and Balkans, capturing Constantinople in 1453 and storming the gates of Vienna two centuries later. At its height, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the...