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The change in culture of Turkish people within the last century is very surprising. Today, Turkey might be the only country that contains every extreme depiction of east and west culture and many in between grey tones. From the cultural view point, balkanization was the end of Ottoman Empire. Turkish Republic adapted a unitary approach, which was forcing all the different cultures within its boarders to mix with each other under the name of Turkish. The mixing, instead of assimilation is the end result of many grey tones. 80 years of transformation undeniably produced many grey colors of east-west duality. These pictures should be taken as a proof achievement of Turkish democracy as a cauldron of ideas and representations.
The main periods are divided by decades. Because of the loading time of the pictures, each decade has its own page.
History
The country of Turkey has been the site of wide variety of empires and has literally been a crossroads for much of Eurasia. Some of the earliest known inhabitants include the Hattians also known as Hattis, 2500-2000 BCE, who were quite possibly an aboriginal people of Anatolia. They were followed by the Hittites, 2000-1750 BCE, an Indo-European people from the steppes of modern Russia and the Ukraine, who merged with the local population. Later invaders included Phrygians, Lydians, Assyrians,Persians Urartians, Armenians, Kurds, Greeks, Romans, Galatians, Byzantines, Mongols, Arabs and of course Turkic tribes. Most, if not all, of these groups contributed to the modern identity of the Turks, although to varying degrees.
Ultimately, the linguistic and cultural contribution of the Turkic tribes cannot be ignored. The Oğuz were the main Turkic people who moved into Anatolia after 1072 CE. Small bands of Turks began their migration following the victory of the Seljuks, led by Alp Arslan, against the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert and this paved the way for Turkish dominance in Anatolia. This also marked the beginning of the decline of the Byzantine empire. In the centuries after Manzikert, the relatively small number of Turkic immigrants began to assimilate local populations as their numbers grew. Anatolia was an ethnic mosaic, a region with a wide variety of peoples, but dominated by the Greek-speaking Byzantines (who were themselves Hellenized Anatolians) and other prominent regional groups such as Armenians, Kurds, and others. Anatolia had become a major center of Christianity since the Council of Niceae and the process of Christianization started by the Roman emperor Constantine had long since established eastern Christianity in the region by the time of Turkic ascendency. The majority of the people were adherents of Greek Orthodox church, but there were many adherents of other Christian churches or syncretist movements, as well as Jews and the Zoroastrian and Christian Kurds. Over time, as word spread regarding the victory of the Turks in Anatolia, more Turkic ghazis arrived from the Caucasus, Arab lands and Central Asia. These groups in turn merged with the local inhabitants as a slow process of conversion to Islam took place, thanks in large measure to the efforts of the sufis, that helped to bolster the Turkish-speaking population. While most historians believe that the actual migration of Turks was relatively small, genetic testing has revealed that as much as 30% of Turks have varying degrees of Central Asian ancestry.Although, result of another genetic testing suggests that the actual Central Asian ancestry could be less than 9%**.
The Modern Turks
Ultimately, it is absurd to speak of any ‘Turkish race’ in the tangled ethnic web of Anatolia. Race as a genetic-based social category that is in any case a concept of the XIXth century, is no longer accepted by most social scientists. The Turks have successfully assimilated a wide variety of peoples and many reject any ethnic or ancestral distinctions. One Turkish saying clarifies this view, "We Turks resemble ourselves." As such, official Turkish history relates the population as derived from Oghuz Turks, although in recent years many historians have put forth the possibilities of long forgotten ancestors such as the Hittites as well.
As a matter of fact, most present-day Turks are the offspring of all sorts of populations whose original languages have sometimes been extinct several centuries ago. Among the Black Sea Turkish intellectuals there has been a revival of interest for the forgotten ethnic and religious identities of many ancestors who feared to pass on any non-Turkish or non-Muslim traditions to their children due to fear of a reprisals. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Black Sea website based on the research by Özhan Öztürk, but also the books of Ömer Asan and Selma Koçiva (see also her site*, only in Turkish and Laz languages) are good illustrations of this trend, unthinkable 5 years ago and still under attack of (right- and left-wing) Turkish nationalists who label it as pure "national treason" and "betrayal of Atatürk's heritage".
There have also been through the XIXth and XXth centuries, and still nowadays, rumors of the existence, mostly in rural and small town areas, of large populations of Crypto-Christians and Crypto-Jews, notably among the Dönme, descendents of Sabbatai Zevi's followers who had to convert en masse following Zevi's example.
The Turks of Turkey can be broken down into a variety of segments and the majority of self-identifying Turks include four main groupings: Rumelian Turks who are mostly of Balkan origin, Anatolian Turks who compose the bulk of ethnic Turks found in Anatolia, Central Asian Turks who remain a large segment of the population that has been moving to Turkey for centuries, and Eurasian Turks from Russia and the Caucasus such as the Tatars and Azerbaijanis. These Turks share similar languages and cultures, while individual Turks may identify with distinct parentage as well such as being part-Circassian or part-Arab, etc.
Turkish phenotypes and diversity
While the majority of Turks do bear a common brunette Mediterranean appearance similar to that of neighboring countries, there are large visible exceptions that are a testament to the legacy of population movements into the region. People walking in a Turkish street or watching a Turkish movie can see Turks of about all physical types prevalent in the country, from the blond haired and-blue-eyed to the Asiatic Mongol individuals, and even people with some partial black African roots, from the times when the Ottoman Empire stretched into Sudan. Turkey, like so many other vast former imperialist powers such as the Romans and the British, in part reflects its imperial past.
Proving the difficulty of classifying ethnicities living in Turkey, there are as many classifications as the number of scientific attempts to make these classifications. Turkey is not a unique example for that and many European countries (e.g. France, Germany) bear a similar ethnic diversity. So, the immense variety observed in the published figures for the percentages of Turkish people living in Turkey (ranging from 75 to 97%) totally depends on the method used to classify the ethnicities. Complicating the matter even more is the fact that the last official and country-wide classification of spoken languages (which do not exactly coincide with ethnic groups) in Turkey that was performed in 1965 and many of the figures published after that time are remain static estimates. It is necessary to take into account all these difficulties and be cautious while evaluating the ethnic identity of the Turks of Turkey. A possible comprehensive list of ethnic origins for Turks living in Turkey could be as follows (based on the classification of P.A. Andrews (1), however this book is more like a review and depends on other people's publications):
- Turkic-speaking peoples: Kirghiz, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kumyks, Yürüks, Uzbeks, Tatars, Azeris, Balkars, Uyghurs, Karachays.
- Kurds and Zaza
- Arabs
- Assyrians (also called Arameans, Syriacs, Chaldeans)
- Georgians and Laz
- Armenians and Hamshenis
- Greeks, Pontic Greeks and Greek-speaking Muslims
- Other Muslim groups originally from the Balkans (Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbians, Croatians, Romanians and Bosniaks): These people migrated to Anatolia during the Ottoman Era as well as following recent upheaveals in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia and most have been assumed to accept a Turkish-Muslim identity.
- Circassians and Chechens
- Others: There are small groups and individuals from all over the world living in Turkey, either remnants of past migrations (there is for instance a village near the Bosphorus named Adampol in Polish, Polonezköy, "the Polish village", in Turkish, and there is also a group of Bosphorus Germans) or witnesses of contemporary mass migrations towards the European Union and its periphery (there are also illegal migrants camps with thousands of Africans and others intercepted while trying to embark, or swimming from the wreckage of overpopulated small boats, for the Greek or Italian shores).
See also
"People of Turkey"