Türkiye historical timeline

Origins

Anatolia has been inhabited for as long as anywhere: Göbekli Tepe, in the south-east, is a complex of carved stone enclosures built around 9500 BC — before pottery, before agriculture, before the wheel — and it forced archaeologists to reconsider the order in which civilisation was assumed to have arrived. Çatalhöyük followed, then the Hittites, Troy, the Greek cities of the Aegean coast, and Rome. In 330 Emperor Constantine refounded Byzantium as his capital, and it remained the centre of the Roman and then Byzantine world for eleven centuries.

Turning points

Turkic peoples moved into Anatolia after the battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Ottomans rose from a small frontier principality, took Constantinople in 1453, and built an empire that at its height ran from Hungary to Yemen and from Algiers to the Caucasus, governing its religious communities through a system that gave each a degree of self-administration. Decline through the nineteenth century ended in defeat in the First World War, during which the Armenian population of Anatolia was deported and killed in numbers that most historians and many states describe as genocide, a characterisation Turkey rejects. Mustafa Kemal led a war of independence against partition and declared the republic in 1923, then replaced the caliphate, the Arabic script, the legal codes and the calendar within a decade. Multiparty politics arrived in 1950, interrupted by military coups; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has led the country since 2003, and a referendum in 2017 moved it to a presidential system.

Influential people

Suleiman the Magnificent, under whom the empire reached its extent, and Mimar Sinan, his architect, who built several hundred structures and defined how a mosque looks. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose reforms remade the country and whose image is still on every wall. Rumi, who lived and taught in Konya. Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate in literature. And Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Cultural evolution

Turkish was rewritten in Latin script in 1928 and purged of a great deal of Arabic and Persian vocabulary, which means most Turks cannot read a document from a century ago. Tea is drunk constantly, from tulip glasses, in quantities that lead the world per head. The Mevlevi sema — the whirling ceremony — is UNESCO-listed, as are the oil wrestling at Kirkpinar and the meddah storytelling tradition. And the food is regional to a degree visitors rarely expect: Gaziantep’s kitchen has little to do with the Black Sea coast’s.

Present-day significance

Turkey sits on the Bosphorus and therefore on the Black Sea’s only outlet, which gives it leverage it has used repeatedly. It is a NATO member with an independent foreign policy, hosts the largest refugee population in the world, and has a large manufacturing and construction sector alongside persistent inflation. The earthquakes of February 2023 in the south-east killed more than fifty thousand people and reconstruction continues.