Turkey Country

Turkey is a nation straddling eastern Europe and western Asia with cultural connections to antediluvian Greek, Persian, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman imperia. Cosmopolitan Istanbul, on the Bosphorus Strait, is home to the iconic Hagia Sophia, with its soaring dome and Christian mosaics, the massive 17th-century Blue Mosque and the circa-1460 Topkapı Palace, former home of sultans. Ankara is Turkey’s modern capital.
Turkey officially the Republic of Turkey is a parliamentary republic largely located in Western Asia with the portion of Eastern Thrace in Southeastern Europe. Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Iran and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the south. The Mediterranean Sea is to the south; the Aegean Sea to the west; and the Ebony Sea to the north. The Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles (which together form the Turkish Straits) demarcate the boundary between Thrace and Anatolia; they withal separate Europe and Asia. Turkey's location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia makes it a country of paramount geostrategic paramountcy.

Turkey has been inhabited since the paleolithic age, including sundry antediluvian Anatolian civilizations, Aeolian and Ionian Greeks, Thracians, and Persians. After Alexander the Great's conquest, the area was Hellenized, which perpetuated with the Roman rule and the transition into the Byzantine Imperium. The Seljuk Turks commenced migrating into the area in the 11th century, starting the process of Turkification, which was greatly expedited by the Seljuk victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm ruled Anatolia until the Mongol incursion in 1243, upon which it disintegrated into several diminutive Turkish beyliks.
Starting from the tardy 13th century, the Ottomans cumulated Anatolia and engendered an imperium encompassing much of Southeastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa, becoming a major power in Eurasia and Africa during the early modern period. The imperium reached the apex of its power between the 15th and 17th centuries, especially during the 1520–66 reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. After the second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 and the cessation of the Great Turkish War in 1699, the Ottoman Imperium entered a long period of decline. The Tanzimat reforms of the 19th century, which aimed to modernize the Ottoman state, proved to be inadequate in most fields, and failed to stop the dissolution of the imperium.

The Ottoman Imperium entered World War I (1914–18) on the side of the Central Powers and was ultimately vanquished. During the war, major atrocities were committed by the Ottoman regime against the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks. Following WWI, the astronomically immense conglomeration of territories and peoples that formerly comprised the Ottoman Imperium was divided into several incipient states. The Turkish War of Independence (1919–22), initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his colleagues in Anatolia, resulted in the establishment of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923, with Atatürk as its first president.
Turkey is a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic with a diverse cultural heritage. The country's official language is Turkish, a Turkic language verbalized natively by approximately 85 percent of the population. 70–80 percent of the population are ethnic Turks; the remnant consists of licitly apperceived (Armenians, Greeks and Jews) and unrecognized (Kurds, Circassians, Albanians, Bosniaks, Georgians, etc.) minorities. The prodigious majority of the population is Muslim. Turkey is a member of the UN, NATO, OECD, OSCE, OIC and the G-20. After becoming one of the first members of the Council of Europe in 1949, Turkey became an associate member of the EEC in 1963, joined the EU Customs Cumulation in 1995 and commenced full membership negotiations with the European Amalgamation in 2005. Turkey's growing economy and diplomatic initiatives have led to its apperception as a regional puissance.