Facts about Turkey
Capital Ankara · Europe
10 topics · about 20 minutes
Turkey straddles Europe and Asia across the straits at Istanbul, the only city in the world built on two continents. It was the seat of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires in succession, and the modern republic founded in 1923 remade the state along secular lines within a single decade.
Turkey is organized into 81 provinces spread across two continents, though only a small slice, Eastern Thrace, lies in Europe. The rest is Anatolia: a high interior plateau ringed by mountains, with a Mediterranean coast in the south, an Aegean coast strung with Greek and Roman ruins in the west, and a green, wet Black Sea coast in the north that surprises anyone expecting desert throughout. The land rises eastward toward Mount Ararat and the headwaters of both the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Istanbul holds over 15 million people, making it the most populous city in Europe, though Ankara on the central plateau has been the capital since 1923. Izmir faces the Aegean, Antalya anchors the southern resort coast, and Gaziantep in the southeast is the acknowledged capital of Turkish food. Over 50 million foreign visitors arrive each year, most for some combination of Istanbul’s mosques and bazaars, the beaches of the southwest, the rock landscape of Cappadocia and the classical ruins at Ephesus.
- Population
- 85 million
- Area
- 783,562 km²
- Currency
- Turkish lira (₺)
- Official language
- Turkish
- Provinces
- 81
- Highest point
- Mount Ararat, 5,137 m
The Turkey course
Geography of Turkey
A high plateau between two seas, and the straits that are the only way out of the Black Sea.
History of Turkey
Göbekli Tepe to Atatürk, by way of Constantinople and six centuries of Ottoman rule.
Language of Turkey
Grammar built by stacking suffixes, and an alphabet swapped wholesale in 1928.
Culture of Turkey
Ottoman, Islamic and Central Asian at once, with a century-long argument about secularism.
Economy of Turkey
Cars, textiles and drones, tourism in the tens of millions, and inflation that passed 80 percent.
Politics of Turkey
A presidential republic since 2017, with the same figure at the top since 2003.
Nature & Wildlife of Turkey
Nine thousand plant species, a third found nowhere else, and raptors funnelling over the Bosphorus.
Food & Cuisine of Turkey
Ottoman palace kitchens, dozens of kebabs beyond the döner, and Gaziantep’s protected baklava.
Landmarks of Turkey
A dome unmatched for a thousand years, underground cities, and white travertine terraces.
People & Society of Turkey
Younger than any large European country, with Istanbul alone above 15 million.
Geography of Turkey
Most of Turkey lies in Anatolia in Asia, with the smaller region of Eastern Thrace in Europe, separated by the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. Those straits are the only sea route between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which has made them strategically valuable for three thousand years.
The interior is a high plateau ringed by mountains, rising eastward toward Mount Ararat at 5,137 meters. The country sits on the North Anatolian Fault and suffers severe earthquakes, including the 2023 disaster that killed more than 50,000 people in the southeast. Both the Tigris and the Euphrates rise in eastern Turkey, giving it control over water reaching Syria and Iraq.
History of Turkey
Anatolia holds some of the oldest known settlements anywhere, including Göbekli Tepe from around 9500 BC and the Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük. Hittites, Greeks, Persians and Romans each ruled parts of it, and Constantinople became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire in 330.
Turkic peoples migrated in from Central Asia from the 11th century, and the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, building an empire that reached Vienna and lasted until the First World War. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk led the independence war and founded the republic in 1923, then abolished the caliphate, adopted the Latin alphabet and rebuilt the legal system on European codes. Turkey joined NATO in 1952.
Language of Turkey
Turkish belongs to the Turkic family and is spoken by around 85 million people, with close relatives across Central Asia and the Caucasus. It is agglutinative, so grammar is built by stacking suffixes onto a root, and a single long word can carry what English would need a whole clause to express.
Vowel harmony governs which suffixes attach, meaning the vowels in endings shift to match those in the root. The 1928 alphabet reform replaced Arabic script with a Latin one designed to fit Turkish sounds, and a subsequent purge of Arabic and Persian loanwords changed the vocabulary so much that early republican texts can be hard for young readers. Kurdish is the largest minority language.
Culture of Turkey
Turkish culture draws on Ottoman, Islamic, Anatolian and Central Asian sources at once, visible in music that uses quarter tones absent from Western scales and in an architectural tradition that reached its height with the mosques of Mimar Sinan.
The republic was founded on secularism as a constitutional principle, and the balance between that inheritance and public religious expression has been the defining cultural argument for a century. Around 99 percent of the population is nominally Muslim, mostly Sunni with a significant Alevi minority. Turkish television dramas are exported to more than 150 countries, second only to American series in international sales.
Economy of Turkey
Turkey has a large and diversified economy with major manufacturing in cars, white goods, textiles and steel, exporting mainly to the European Union under a customs union agreement in force since 1995. Turkish construction firms operate across the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.
Tourism draws over 50 million foreign visitors a year to the coasts and historic sites. The persistent problem has been inflation, which passed 80 percent in 2022 after years of unorthodox monetary policy that cut interest rates while prices rose, badly weakening the lira. The country is also a growing arms exporter, particularly of drones.
Politics of Turkey
Turkey became a presidential republic after a narrowly approved referendum in 2017 abolished the office of prime minister and concentrated executive power in the presidency. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has led the country as prime minister and then president since 2003.
The Grand National Assembly is a single chamber of 600 members elected proportionally. The military intervened in politics repeatedly between 1960 and 1997 and attempted a coup in July 2016, after which extensive purges removed tens of thousands from public institutions. Turkey applied to join the European Union in 1987 and accession talks have been effectively frozen since 2018.
Nature & Wildlife of Turkey
Turkey sits where European, Asian and Middle Eastern ecosystems meet, which gives it around 9,000 plant species, roughly a third found nowhere else. That richness compares with the whole of the rest of Europe combined.
Wildlife includes brown bears, wolves, lynx and the Anatolian leopard, along with wild goats in the eastern mountains. The country lies on one of the busiest bird migration routes in the world, and hundreds of thousands of raptors and storks funnel over the Bosphorus each autumn. Loggerhead and green turtles nest on Mediterranean beaches, and Lake Van in the east is the largest soda lake on Earth.
Food & Cuisine of Turkey
Turkish cooking inherited the kitchens of the Ottoman palace, which drew on Balkan, Levantine and Central Asian traditions, and it is regarded as one of the most developed cuisines in the world. Lamb, yoghurt, aubergine, bulgur and olive oil appear constantly.
Kebab covers dozens of regional forms well beyond the döner familiar abroad, and mezze plates open long meals in the same way tapas do in Spain. Baklava layered with pistachio comes above all from Gaziantep, which holds protected status for it. Turkish coffee, prepared unfiltered in a small pot, carries UNESCO heritage listing, and tea is drunk in far greater quantity day to day.
Landmarks of Turkey
Hagia Sophia was completed in 537 as a cathedral, converted to a mosque after 1453, made a museum in 1935 and returned to use as a mosque in 2020. Its dome was the largest in the world for nearly a thousand years and changed how later architects thought about enclosing space.
Cappadocia holds soft volcanic rock eroded into pinnacles, with underground cities carved deep enough to shelter thousands of people, and hot air balloons launch over it daily. Ephesus preserves one of the best surviving Roman cities in the Mediterranean, and the white travertine terraces of Pamukkale have drawn bathers to their mineral pools since antiquity.
People & Society of Turkey
Turkey has about 85 million residents with a median age near 34, younger than any large European country though rising quickly as fertility has fallen below replacement level to around 1.5 births per woman.
Kurds form the largest minority at roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population, concentrated in the southeast, and the conflict between the state and Kurdish armed groups has run since 1984. Around 77 percent of people live in cities, and Istanbul alone holds over 15 million, making it the most populous city in Europe. Turkey has hosted more refugees than any other country for most of the past decade, mainly Syrians.
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