Türkiye

Türkiye bridges two continents. Eastern Thrace lies in Europe and Anatolia in Asia, and between them run the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. Anatolia’s centre is a high, dry plateau ringed by mountains: the Pontic ranges along the Black Sea, the Taurus in the south, and the volcanic highlands of the east, where Lake Van lies and the Tigris and Euphrates begin. The Black Sea coast is wet enough for tea and hazelnuts, and active faults make earthquakes a constant risk.

Anatolia holds some of the oldest monuments known, among them Göbekli Tepe, whose carved pillars were raised by hunter-gatherers, and the early farming town of Çatalhöyük. Hittites, Phrygians, Greeks, Persians and Romans followed. Constantinople was the seat of the Byzantine Empire until the Ottomans took it in 1453, and at its height the Ottoman state stretched from Hungary to Yemen. After defeat in the First World War, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk led a war of independence, founded the Republic in 1923 and pushed through secular reforms.

Turkish culture draws on Central Asia, Persia, the Arab world and the Balkans. Tea is drunk all day from small tulip-shaped glasses, and coffee is brewed thick in a copper pot. The cooking runs from Black Sea anchovies to the kebabs of Gaziantep. The economy is broad: textiles, cars and household appliances made around Bursa and the Sea of Marmara, construction firms working abroad, hazelnuts and dried apricots, and tourism to Istanbul and the southern coasts.