Turkey, exotic,colorful,many-faceted,romantic,ever-old,and ever-new is the gateway and to the fabled east.Turkey is a country located at a point where the three continents of the old world,Asia, Africa and Europe,are closest to each other and where Asia and Europoe meet
Because its geographical location, Anataolia has always been important throughout history and is the birth place of many great civilizations. Turkey is not only a passageway from which the ancient Asian Turkish Culture is transmitted to the Europe, but also coounted as a window of Western Culture opening to meet the Eastern Culture.The surface area of Turkey including the lakes is 815.000 km2 /315.000 Sq.miles. It is much larger than many European countries,for examples bigger than Great Britain and France combined,Italy and Spain together, also 18 % bigger than Texas in USA. Out of the total land, 97 % is in Asia and this part is called Anataloia by Turks or Asia Minor in the history, 3 % is in Europe which is called Thrace, Trakya by the Turks.
The country is divided by the Dardanalles, the sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus and surrounded With Three seas, The Blak Sea on the north, The Aegean on the west and Mediterrenean on the south So it is a Big peninsula.Turkey has boundaries with the neighbouring countries,such as Greece, (212kms/131 miles)and Bulgaria ( 269 kms/167 miles)in the West, Armenia, Georgia, very little part of Azerbaycan( 610kms/380 miles) and Iran( 454 km/ 280 miles) in the East, Syria (877 kms/540 miles) and Irag (331kms/205miles on the south .Turkey is a rectangular shape with a length 1660km/1031 miles and a width of 550 km/341 miles.and is stretching between 26 degrees north to 42 degree north, and from 26 east to 45 east. Turkey has 8200 kms sea shores. Because of these long coastal borders and being a bridge between the continents of Asia and Europe, Turkey had been the center of the major commerce and immigration roads. Ankara has been the capital of Turkey since 1924.
When discussing history it is always difficult to know from which period to actually begin. The earlier civilizations of Anatolia cannot be ignored. Some historians take the advent of the Turks into Anatolia 6000 BC. It has to be noted that civilizations are never built without foundations. Just like a wall made of bricks, they are all established upon former civilizations. Therefore it is quite possible to see traces of the very earliest cultures inherent in those that followed.
As a great world crossroads, the land has seen the struggles and accommodations to each other of the Hattis, and the Assyrians, the Sea peoples, the trojans and the Greeks, the Byzantines, the Crusaders, abd the Seljuks,the Ottomans, The Kurds, The Armenians and the Turks, to name only the most well-known.More than once the personal loyalties have been weighted more on the side of a desire for feuding,or for land, or for tolarence than they have been enclaves of people-identified often not by themselves but by their enemies in terms of religion, language or family-who because of the very rugged topography have maintained their culture unresponsive to and ignored by whatever group claimed to rule the land.
Another major element in the long history is the importance of the trade routes that made a network linking Anatolia to the East, to Egypt and to Europe. The roads usually followed the paths of least
Resistance; they went over mountain passes, along the river valleys and across the safest fords. As
Fully as their builders were able to engineer them, they were all-weather roads;they often were elevated high ways. They were politically important in that they were part of the mechanism keeping
A government in Rome or in Susa in touch with wat was happening in Sardis,for example.
They were important economically in enabling goods and services to move with dispacts. They were important tools in faciliating the communication of ideas.The spread of Christianity and later of Islam followed the trade routes. Regularly at about the distance that could be travelled in a day there was some kind of shelter for people and their animals to spend the night. Many of the towns and cities evolved as part of the system of roads, shelters, caravansaries and marketplaces.Besides the routes on land people also used a relay of fire towers to communicate quickly over long Distances. Crusader castles were sited on hilltops so as tbe the places of defense and alarm,so as to be able to signal to each other.
Between 2000 and 12000 BC, the civilization of incoming Hittites, as they came to be known, was caught up in the dominant culture.The Hittites are a people mentioned frequently in the Bible (Old Testament).Hattis, Hurrians and Luwians and assumed in time a character and significance of its own.
The Hittite civilization directly affected its own sucessors, Urartians, Hellenes and Etruscans.After all,Since the civilizations are the creation of soceities not races, their characters are passed on by socialTraditions not blood ties;so, for example,the ancient Greek Mythology and religion in one direction,no less than Urartian in the other show market Hittite influence. Then, the peoples of Turkey did not form a single society. There were numerous societies with different metarial, spirtitual and linguistic conventions;each built up its own tradition, preserved and then transmitted it. Thus, at the time of Hittite Empire,when over 20 languages were in use, intercourse among peoples had already begun to draw to a larger human mosaic. This produced a socail pattern, both geographically and historically in which traditions were blended, discoveries and inventions passed on and most important, customs and habits diffused. For instance, myths and epics borrowed from the Hittites from outside, particularly in Babylon, traveleld extensively through other cultures of the ancient world, from the Sumerian of the 4th and 3rd milennia in mesopotemia as far in time and space as the Hellenisatic period of western Turkey and the Agean.
And the passage of time was maked by the development of language into something far more complex than a mere wehicle for the transmission of tradition and experience. Its utilisation for the expression of ideas and concepts saw the emergence of western Turkey by the 6C BC as the home of philosophy. Thales,Anaximander, Anaimenes, Heraclitus established the area as the cultural heart of the world’s landscape. The mid 4C BC heralded the thesut of the accumulated civilization of the classical period .Throughout the surrounding regions of the so called Near East and the Mediterrrenean, until blocked By the rise of Rome some two venturies later. For the eastward conquest of Alexander of Macedon prompted the mutual accommodation of the cultures of Asia and Europe, and the development of the Earliest urban centres of the Hellenistic Age- the coastal cities of
Pergamum, Ephesus, Priene, Miletus and Didyma. The cultural equals of Rome in its heyday, these cities with their flourishing art had a direct and improtant influence on the civilization of the Roman Empire and no less on its eastern Roman successor right up to the Byzantine zenith in 10C BC.
Subsequently, as the region came to be dominated by the Seljuk Turks in the 11C AD, their particular mastery in,for example, the building of medreses ( Islamic Institutes of higher education), hospitals, observatories, bridges and caravesaries-as well as carpet weaving and other crfats- made its own distinctive contrubiton. Then, from the 13-20 C AD, one of the world’s most durable imperial dynasties, the Ottomans,impressed its own seal on the culture of Turkey and created a vast territorial empire, based on the strength and integrity of this cultural resource-base. And so we come to modern Turkey,- which was established Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the beginning of 20 th C-