Human history in Anatolia is so old that it redefined what we thought we knew about our origins. At Göbekli Tepe, near Şanlıurfa, in the southeast of the country, archaeologists uncovered a set of circles of stone pillars carved with animals, begun around 9500 BC, in the middle of the Neolithic and before the invention of agriculture and pottery. It is the oldest known monumental sanctuary in the world: it predates Stonehenge by some six thousand years and forced archaeologists to rethink the idea that organised religion was born after cities, rather than the other way round. A few kilometres away, at Çatalhöyük, around 7500 BC one of humanity's first large urban settlements flourished, a maze of mudbrick houses entered through the roof.
By the second millennium BC, central Anatolia was the heart of the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of the Bronze Age, with its capital at Hattusa (today Boğazkale). The Hittites mastered iron, wrote on clay tablets and signed with the Egypt of Ramesses II, after the battle of Kadesh (around 1274 BC), what is usually considered the oldest surviving peace treaty. After the Bronze Age collapse, around 1200 BC, peoples such as the Phrygians emerged — whose legendary king, Midas, remained tied to the myth of the golden touch and the Gordian knot — along with the Lydians of Sardis, credited with striking the first metal coinage in history, under the proverbially rich king Croesus.
On the western coast, meanwhile, legend and archaeology meet at Troy. The excavations Heinrich Schliemann began in 1871 on the hill of Hisarlık revealed nine cities stacked on top of one another; one of them, destroyed around 1180 BC, fed the story of the Trojan War that Homer fixed in the Iliad. Three thousand years ago Anatolia was already a mosaic of peoples and languages looking out over the Aegean.
From the 8th century BC, Greek colonists settled the whole Aegean coast of Anatolia and founded cities that would become beacons of ancient culture: Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna, Halicarnassus. That region, called Ionia, was nothing less than the cradle of Western philosophy and science. In Miletus thought Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, the first to try to explain the world without appealing to the gods; Herodotus, 'the father of history', was from Halicarnassus; and Heraclitus taught in Ephesus. It was one of the most astonishing concentrations of talent in antiquity.
That prosperity turned Anatolia into a prize to be fought over. In the 6th century BC, the Achaemenid Persian Empire subdued the Ionian cities; their revolt against Persia, around 499 BC, set off the Greco-Persian Wars that would pit Greeks against Persians for generations. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great crossed into Asia in 334 BC, beat the Persians at the river Granicus and at Issus, cut the Gordian knot with a single stroke and opened Anatolia to the Greek world. After his death, his generals divided the empire and Hellenistic kingdoms arose — that of the Seleucids, that of Pergamon under the Attalids — which made the region a centre of art and learning, with the famous library of Pergamon rivalling that of Alexandria.
Rome arrived by inheritance and by conquest: in 133 BC, the last king of Pergamon, Attalus III, bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman Republic, which turned it into the province of Asia. Little by little, all of Anatolia came under the Roman eagle, with cities that reached monumental splendour — Ephesus came to have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants — and which would also be a decisive stage for the spread of a new religion: Christianity. Saint Paul travelled these lands and wrote to communities in Ephesus, Galatia and Colossae; the Book of Revelation addresses the 'seven churches of Asia', all in western Anatolia.
The event that would define the region's fate for more than a thousand years came in the year 330, when the emperor Constantine the Great inaugurated a new capital for the Roman Empire on the site of the old Greek colony of Byzantium, on the Bosphorus strait. He named it New Rome, but it went down in history under his own name: Constantinople. Its location was perfect, a defensible promontory controlling the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and between Europe and Asia. Constantine was also the first emperor to protect Christianity, and under his successors it would become the official religion of the state.
When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, the Eastern one — which modern historians call the Byzantine Empire, though its inhabitants called themselves Romans — remained standing, with Constantinople as its capital and Greek as its language. Its greatest splendour came with Justinian I (527-565), who reconquered part of the Mediterranean, codified Roman law in the Corpus Iuris Civilis — the basis of the Western legal tradition — and ordered the raising of Hagia Sophia, completed in 537. For almost a thousand years it was the largest church in Christendom and a marvel of engineering, with its enormous dome that seemed suspended from heaven.
For centuries, Constantinople was the richest and most populous city in Europe, a magnet for merchants, pilgrims and armies. It withstood Arab, Avar and Bulgar sieges thanks to its triple walls and to 'Greek fire', an incendiary weapon whose formula was a state secret. But the empire also bled itself dry in wars and schisms: in 1054, the definitive break between the Church of Rome and that of Constantinople completed the Great Schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. And in 1204, in one of the most shameful episodes of the Middle Ages, the Fourth Crusade — Christians from the West — sacked and occupied Constantinople, a blow from which Byzantium would never fully recover. By then, moreover, a new people had spent more than a century redrawing the map of Anatolia.
The Turks were not native to Anatolia. They came from the steppes of Central Asia, they were nomadic peoples of Turkic language, and in their expansion westward they converted to Islam and founded, in the 11th century, the great Seljuk Empire, which dominated Persia and Mesopotamia. Bands of Turkish warriors began raiding the eastern frontiers of Byzantium, sacking cities in Armenia and Anatolia. In 1064 they razed Ani, the splendid capital of the Armenian kingdom.
The decisive clash came on 26 August 1071 at Manzikert (today Malazgirt), near Lake Van. The Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes marched east with a large army to stop the invaders once and for all, and faced the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan. The battle was a disaster for Byzantium: the Turkish cavalry, with its tactic of feigned retreat and harassment by mounted archers, broke the imperial army, partly through the treachery of commanders who abandoned the field. The emperor himself was taken prisoner, something almost unheard of in Roman history.
Manzikert did not destroy Byzantium in one blow, but it opened up its heart. With the empire sunk in civil wars, the Turkish tribes spilled across Anatolia almost unopposed and founded the Sultanate of Rum — 'Rum' for 'Rome', that is, the sultanate on Roman lands — with its capital eventually at Konya. Within a few decades, the Anatolian plateau, which had been Greek and Christian for more than a millennium, began a long process of Turkification and Islamisation. Historians of every stripe agree that 1071 was a turning point: without Manzikert there would probably have been no First Crusade — called in 1095, partly in response to the Byzantine plea for help — no Turkish Anatolia and, centuries later, no fall of Constantinople.
Of the many Turkish principalities that emerged after the disintegration of the Sultanate of Rum, one small one, settled in northwestern Anatolia, was destined for greatness. It was ruled by a warrior chief named Osman — hence 'Ottoman' — and around 1300 it began to expand at the expense of the last Byzantine territories. The Ottomans combined the fervour of frontier holy war with a remarkable capacity for organisation and for assimilating other peoples. In 1326 they took Bursa, in 1361 Adrianople (Edirne), and by the end of the 14th century they already controlled much of the Balkans, leaving Constantinople as a Christian enclave surrounded by their empire.
The final blow was struck by Mehmed II, barely a young man of 21 whom history would know as 'the Conqueror'. In the spring of 1453 he laid siege to Constantinople with an enormous army and revolutionary artillery, including a gigantic cannon cast to bring down the thousand-year-old walls that had always protected the city. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, defended the place with a few thousand men against tens of thousands of besiegers. After almost two months of siege, in the early hours of 29 May 1453, the Ottomans broke through the defences; the emperor died fighting and the city was taken. With it, after more than a thousand years, the Eastern Roman Empire was extinguished.
The fall of Constantinople echoed across Europe and is usually marked as the end of the Middle Ages. Mehmed II made the city his new capital, repopulated it and turned it into the centre of a universal Islamic empire; he converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque and proclaimed himself heir both to the Islamic sultanate and to the Roman imperial legacy. The city would come to be popularly known as Istanbul. In barely a century and a half, a frontier principality had become the greatest power in the eastern Mediterranean.
The 16th century was the Ottoman golden age. Under Selim I (1512-1520), the empire doubled in size by conquering Syria, Egypt and the holy places of Islam, Mecca and Medina; with that the sultan took the title of caliph, spiritual leader of the Sunni Muslim world. But the figure who embodies the peak is his son, Suleiman, who reigned for almost half a century (1520-1566) and whom Europeans called 'the Magnificent' and the Turks 'Kanuni', the Lawgiver.
Under Suleiman, the empire spread across three continents. His armies took Belgrade and Rhodes, crushed the kingdom of Hungary at the battle of Mohács (1526) and went as far as laying siege to Vienna in 1529, the westernmost point of Ottoman expansion. His fleet, commanded by the corsair Barbarossa, dominated much of the Mediterranean. By the middle of the century, the empire stretched from Algeria to Iraq and from Hungary to Yemen, with some 15 to 20 million inhabitants speaking dozens of languages and following many religions.
The splendour was not only military. Suleiman reformed the legal system, protected the arts and commissioned the brilliant architect Mimar Sinan to build the great imperial mosques — the Süleymaniye in Istanbul, the Selimiye in Edirne — which still define the skyline of Turkish cities today. The Ottoman state administered its enormous diversity through the 'millet' system, which granted each religious community — Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews — autonomy to run its own internal affairs. For its time it was a remarkably plural empire, which took in, for example, the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. That moment of maximum glory, however, already held the seeds of a long decline.
After Suleiman's death, the empire remained formidable for more than a century, but it kept losing ground to a Europe that was transforming at top speed. The breaking point is usually placed at the second siege of Vienna, in 1683, where an Ottoman army was defeated by a Christian coalition led by the Polish king John III Sobieski. From then on, the tide turned: under the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, the Ottomans gave up Hungary and large territories, the first great retreat in their history.
Through the 18th century and above all the 19th, the empire was dismembered under pressure from the European powers — especially Tsarist Russia, which craved an outlet to the Mediterranean — and from the rise of nationalism among its Christian peoples in the Balkans. Greece won its independence in 1830 after a bloody war; Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Montenegro followed the same path. The empire's chronic weakness earned it the nickname 'the sick man of Europe' in the chancelleries of Europe, and its carve-up became the so-called 'Eastern Question' that obsessed 19th-century diplomacy.
There were serious attempts at reform. The Tanzimat period (1839-1876) sought to modernise the state, make Muslims and non-Muslims equal before the law and create a European-style army, schools and legal codes. In 1876 a first constitution was even promulgated, soon suspended by sultan Abdülhamid II, who ruled in authoritarian fashion for three decades. Frustration with stagnation and despotism fed the Young Turk movement, nationalist officers and officials who in 1908 forced the constitution to be restored. Their arrival in power, however, coincided with fresh defeats — the loss of Libya and almost all of the Balkans in the wars of 1911-1913 — and would lead, a few years later, to the catastrophe of the First World War.
In 1914, the Young Turk government — dominated by the triumvirate of Enver, Talat and Cemal Pasha — took the Ottoman Empire into the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. It was a desperate bet to reverse the decline, and it proved ruinous. The empire fought on multiple fronts: the Caucasus against Russia, Mesopotamia and Palestine against the British, and the Dardanelles.
There, on the Gallipoli peninsula, on the shores of the Dardanelles strait, one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war was fought in 1915-1916. The Allies, above all British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops (the famous ANZACs), tried to force the strait and take Constantinople, but failed against fierce Ottoman resistance after months of fighting and hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides. The defence of Gallipoli catapulted to fame an Ottoman colonel named Mustafa Kemal, who would be the key man of the future. For Australians and New Zealanders, the campaign became a national founding myth still commemorated every 25 April, ANZAC Day.
Despite the victory at Gallipoli, the empire collapsed. In 1916 the Arabs revolted with British support; in 1917-1918 Baghdad, Jerusalem and Damascus fell. The armistice of Mudros, in October 1918, sealed the Ottoman surrender. The victorious powers set about dividing the spoils: the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 dismembered what was left of the empire, handed territories to Greece, Armenia, France and Italy and left barely a stump of a Turkish state under foreign control. But in the middle of that collapse one of the gravest crimes of the century had also been committed, and a resistance was beginning to take shape that would change the course of events.
In the middle of the war, the Young Turk government carried out what most historians consider the first large-scale genocide of the 20th century. On 24 April 1915 — the date the Armenian people commemorate today — hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders were arrested in Constantinople. That was followed by the systematic deportation of the Armenian population of Anatolia towards the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. The columns of deportees, mostly women, the elderly and children, were subjected to forced marches without food or water, massacres, rape and slavery. Estimates of the death toll range between some six hundred thousand and one and a half million people; the figure of 1.5 million is the one upheld by most scholars and by numerous states.
At the same time, and as part of the same process of exterminating the empire's Christian minorities, the Sayfo (which in Aramaic means 'the sword') was carried out: the genocide of the Syriac Christians — Assyrians, Arameans and Chaldeans — with a number of victims estimated at between some 250,000 and 300,000 by conservative calculations, and up to around 500,000 or more according to others. Hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks were also massacred and expelled, above all from Pontus, on the Black Sea. Within a few years, thousand-year-old Christian communities were wiped off the map of Anatolia.
This chapter demands precision and restraint. There is a very broad academic and historical consensus in describing what happened to the Armenians as genocide: more than thirty countries, among them several Latin American ones, have officially recognised it, as have numerous parliaments and institutions. The Republic of Turkey, by contrast, officially denies that there was a genocide: it acknowledges that there were deaths and suffering, but attributes them to the chaos of war, to Armenian rebellions and to famine, and maintains that the figures are inflated. This state denial is a recurrent source of diplomatic tension. Setting out the facts — the planned deportation, the massacres, the number of victims — and at the same time noting the official Turkish position is not taking a nationalist side: it is distinguishing between historiographical consensus and the policy of a state.
The humiliating Treaty of Sèvres, which amputated Anatolia and shared it out among foreign powers and Greece, provoked a nationalist reaction. Its leader was Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, who from 1919 organised a resistance movement in the Anatolian interior with its capital at Ankara and a parliament of its own, the Grand National Assembly, defying both the occupiers and the sultan's government in Istanbul. So began the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), fought above all against the Greek army that had landed at Smyrna and advanced inland.
After hard fighting, Kemal's forces held and then reversed the Greek offensive at the battles of the river Sakarya (1921) and the Great Offensive of 1922, which ended with the recapture of Smyrna in September of that year. The victory forced the powers to renegotiate: the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in July 1923, annulled that of Sèvres, recognised Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia and eastern Thrace and set the borders the country keeps today. Lausanne also included a huge compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey — more than a million Orthodox Greeks and hundreds of thousands of Muslims were uprooted from lands where they had lived for centuries — a demographic and human wound with long-lasting effects.
On 29 October 1923 the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed, with Mustafa Kemal as its first president; in 1934 parliament would grant him the surname Atatürk, 'father of the Turks'. From power he undertook an unprecedented cultural and political revolution to turn the old Islamic empire into a modern, European and secular nation-state. He abolished the sultanate (1922) and the caliphate (1924); replaced Islamic law with codes of European inspiration; adopted the Latin alphabet instead of the Arabic one (1928); imposed the Western calendar and Western dress; granted women the right to vote before many European countries did; and enshrined secularism as a principle of the state, one of the pillars of Kemalism. It was an accelerated modernisation imposed from above, authoritarian in its methods and profound in its effects, which still defines the fault lines of present-day Turkey.
After Atatürk's death in 1938, his successor İsmet İnönü kept Turkey neutral almost until the end of the Second World War. In 1950, the country held its first fully democratic elections and, in the framework of the Cold War, aligned firmly with the West: in 1952 it joined NATO, in which it still has one of the largest armies, and it became a key strategic partner because of its border with the Soviet Union. Domestic political life, however, was turbulent, with repeated military coups — 1960, 1971, 1980 — in which the army, self-appointed guardian of Atatürk's secular legacy, stepped in to overthrow governments.
Two conflicts marked the period. In 1974, after a coup in Cyprus backed by the Greek military junta that sought to unite the island with Greece, Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, and that occupation led to the de facto partition of the island and to the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognised only by Ankara; the 'Cyprus question' remains unresolved. And since 1984, in the Kurdish-majority southeast, a long armed conflict has been fought between the Turkish state and the PKK, a Kurdish guerrilla group considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union and the United States. That war has caused tens of thousands of deaths and successive phases of violence, truces and breakdowns. The so-called Kurdish question — the cultural, linguistic and political rights of the country's largest minority, some fifteen million people — is one of the most sensitive debates in Turkish politics, cut through by legitimate demands, state repression and also insurgent violence; it is best treated without simplifications or taking sides.
Since 2003, the dominant figure has been Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first as prime minister and since 2014 as president. His party, the AKP, with moderate Islamist roots, won election after election on the back of strong initial economic growth and the conservative and religious vote, reversing decades of militant secularism. Turkey opened negotiations to join the European Union in 2005, and they are now frozen. After the failed coup attempt of July 2016, Erdoğan drove a mass purge and a constitutional reform that in 2017 concentrated power in a presidential system, amid growing criticism over democratic backsliding and restrictions on the press and the opposition. A regional power of more than 85 million people, a bridge between Europe and Asia and between East and West, 21st-century Turkey is still torn between its secular heritage and its Muslim identity, between looking to Europe and its ambition to lead in its own neighbourhood.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
More than 2,500 years ago, the Aegean coast of Turkey was one of the most brilliant places in the ancient world. Colonised by Greeks from the 8th century BC, the region of Ionia brought together rich and cultured cities — Miletus, Ephesus, Priene, Colophon — that gave rise to Western philosophy and science. In Miletus, Thales predicted an eclipse and tried to explain the universe starting from water; Anaximander drew one of the first maps of the world; and this coast also produced Pythagoras, from the neighbouring island of Samos, and Herodotus, the father of history, born in Halicarnassus.
That intellectual ferment lived alongside the rivalry of great powers. The Ionian cities fell under the Persian Empire in the 6th century BC, and their revolt around 499 BC lit the Greco-Persian Wars between Greeks and Persians. Then came Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms, and finally Rome, under which the region reached its greatest material splendour. The Turkish Aegean is, in a sense, an open-air museum of Greek thought and art, on land that today is fully Turkish.
Ephesus was one of the most important cities of the ancient Mediterranean: by some estimates it reached between 200,000 and 250,000 inhabitants, and it was one of the great commercial and religious centres of Asia Minor. There stood the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, of which barely a column remains today. Under Rome, Ephesus was capital of the province of Asia, and its ruins — the monumental façade of the Library of Celsus, the great theatre with room for 25,000 spectators, the houses with mosaics — are among the best preserved in the entire Greco-Roman world.
Ephesus also played a central role in the beginnings of Christianity. Saint Paul lived and preached there, and his famous letter to the Ephesians is addressed to that community; the Acts of the Apostles tell of the riot of the silversmiths who saw the cult of Artemis threatened. Tradition holds that the apostle John spent his last years in the city and that the Virgin Mary went with him, which is why the House of the Virgin is venerated nearby. In the year 431, Ephesus hosted an ecumenical council decisive for Christian doctrine. Today it is one of the most visited archaeological sites in Turkey and a World Heritage Site.
Inland, in the Aegean region, nature created one of the most singular landscapes in Turkey: the petrified waterfalls of Pamukkale, whose name means 'cotton castle'. For millennia, thermal water loaded with calcium carbonate spilled down the slope and laid down dazzling white travertine terraces, with natural pools of warm turquoise water. The geological phenomenon is so striking that it drew visitors back in antiquity.
Right above the terraces, the kings of Pergamon founded the city of Hierapolis in the 2nd century BC, which flourished under Rome as a thermal centre where the sick came from all over the empire seeking a cure in its waters. Its ruins include a large theatre, temples, and an enormous necropolis with thousands of tombs, many of people who travelled there hoping to be healed and ended up buried. Under Christianity, Hierapolis was also a religious centre, linked to the tradition of the martyrdom of the apostle Philip. The Hierapolis-Pamukkale complex is a World Heritage Site, a rare case in which a natural wonder and an ancient city merge into a single place.
Today's glamorous Bodrum, with its white houses and its marina, stands on ancient Halicarnassus, a Greek city in the region of Caria that gave the world two enormous legacies. The first is Herodotus, born there around 484 BC, whose 'Histories' founded the historical genre in the West. The second gives its name to a word we use every day: the Mausoleum. Around 350 BC, queen Artemisia had a monumental tomb built for her husband and brother, the satrap Mausolus, so splendid that it became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; from his name comes the word 'mausoleum' in every European language.
The Mausoleum survived partly into the Middle Ages, when a series of earthquakes ruined it. In the 15th century, the Knights Hospitaller of Saint John — the same order that would later go to Malta — reused its stones to build the castle of Saint Peter, the imposing Crusader fortress that still dominates Bodrum's harbour and today houses a world-famous museum of underwater archaeology. So in a single place classical Greece, the Crusades and 21st-century tourism are stacked on top of one another.
İzmir, ancient Smyrna, is the great city of the Aegean and one of the most cosmopolitan in Ottoman history: for centuries Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Europeans lived there side by side, and it was known as 'Smyrna the infidel' for its mercantile, multicultural character. That world collapsed in September 1922, at the end of the Turkish War of Independence. When Mustafa Kemal's troops retook the city after the Greek army withdrew, a great fire devastated the Christian quarters — Greek and Armenian — amid killings and a desperate evacuation by sea of tens of thousands of people. The 'Catastrophe of Smyrna', as the Greeks remember it, marked the tragic end of the thousand-year-old Greek presence in Anatolia.
The outcome of that war was sealed by the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which included a compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey based on religion: around 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were expelled from Anatolia to Greece, and some 400,000 Muslims had to leave Greece for Turkey. It was one of the first great 'legalised' forced displacements of the 20th century, and it transformed the human make-up of the whole Aegean coast at the root: entire towns that had been Greek for generations were left empty or repopulated with Muslim refugees. Modern İzmir, rebuilt and turned towards the sea, carries beneath its vitality the memory of that tearing apart.
The central Anatolian plateau was the stage for some of the first great states in history. Around 1650 BC, the Hittites founded an empire with its capital at Hattusa, near present-day Boğazkale, which rivalled Egypt and Babylon for control of the Near East. They were pioneers in the use of iron and in diplomacy: the treaty they signed with Ramesses II after the battle of Kadesh, around 1259 BC, survives and is usually considered the oldest international peace agreement in the world; a copy hangs at the United Nations headquarters. The ruins of Hattusa, with their walls and their Lion Gate, are a World Heritage Site.
After the Hittite collapse, around 1200 BC, the kingdom of Phrygia arose in the same region, with its capital at Gordion. To the Phrygians belongs the legendary king Midas, to whom Greek myth attributed the gift of turning everything he touched into gold, and also the famous Gordian knot which, according to legend, only the future master of Asia could untie: Alexander the Great cut it with a single stroke of his sword in 333 BC. Further west reigned the Lydians of Sardis, credited with the invention of struck coinage and whose last king, Croesus, was proverbial for his wealth before falling to the Persians. All this layer of kingdoms earlier than the Greeks and Romans makes central Anatolia one of the oldest archaeological regions on the planet.
Ankara is far older than its modern look suggests. In antiquity it was called Ancyra and was, in the 3rd century BC, the capital of the Galatians, a Celtic people who had migrated from Europe to central Anatolia — the same 'Galatians' to whom Saint Paul addressed one of his epistles. Under Rome it was an important city, and it still keeps the Monumentum Ancyranum, the temple on whose walls the political testament of the emperor Augustus was carved, one of the most valuable inscriptions of antiquity.
For centuries, however, Ankara was a modest inland trading town, known for the wool of its angora goats (the source of the words 'angora' and 'mohair'). Its great leap came in the 20th century: Mustafa Kemal chose it as the base of the nationalist resistance during the War of Independence, and in 1923 he made it the capital of the new republic, instead of imperial, cosmopolitan Istanbul. The decision was deliberate and symbolic: to found the modern nation in the heart of Anatolia, far from the Ottoman past. Ankara then became a planned capital, seat of government, and today it holds the Anıtkabir, Atatürk's imposing mausoleum, and the excellent Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, which sums up thousands of years of the region's history.
The unreal landscape of Cappadocia — with its 'fairy chimneys', eroded valleys and soft volcanic rock — is the work of millions of years of erosion, but its human history is just as astonishing. Because the stone is easy to dig, people have spent millennia carving houses, churches and whole cities out of it. The rock was already being hollowed out in Hittite times, and under Rome and Byzantium Cappadocia became one of the great centres of early Christianity.
In the 4th century and after, the region was the cradle of important theologians — the so-called Cappadocian Fathers, such as Saint Basil — and filled with monasteries and thousands of rock-cut churches, many decorated with Byzantine frescoes that still survive, above all in the Göreme valley, today a World Heritage Site. Faced with raids by Arabs first and Turks later, the Christian communities also dug entire underground cities — such as Derinkuyu, able to shelter thousands of people with their animals across several levels below ground — to take refuge from attack. Cappadocia is thus one of the most impressive testimonies to how a whole population made itself a world inside the rock in order to survive and pray.
Konya was the capital of the Sultanate of Rum, the state the Seljuk Turks founded in Anatolia after the battle of Manzikert. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, under the Seljuks, the city lived a cultural and architectural golden age, with madrasas, mosques and caravanserais that made it one of the great centres of the medieval Islamic world. From that period date monuments such as the Karatay madrasa, with its tiled dome imitating the starry sky.
But Konya's universal fame is owed to one man: Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī, the 13th-century Persian poet and mystic known simply as Rumi or Mevlâna, who lived, taught and died in the city. His poetry about divine love is among the most widely read in the world, and his followers founded the Mevlevi order, that of the famous 'whirling dervishes', whose ecstatic dance — the sema, in which they spin without stopping to draw closer to God — is today part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Rumi's mausoleum, crowned by its unmistakable deep green dome, is Turkey's main place of spiritual pilgrimage and makes Konya a more religious and conservative city than the country's average.
North of the plateau, on the way to the Black Sea coast, the small town of Safranbolu preserves the look of a classic Ottoman settlement as few others do. Its name comes from the saffron ('safran') that was grown in the area, an extremely valuable spice. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, Safranbolu prospered as a stop on the caravan trade routes linking the interior with the Black Sea ports, and that trade paid for the beautiful wooden merchants' houses that today earned it World Heritage status as an exceptional example of Ottoman urban architecture.
The Black Sea coast, rainier and greener than the rest of Anatolia, had a history of its own. In antiquity it was colonised by Greeks — hence the myth of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the golden fleece, or of the Amazons — and in the Middle Ages it held the Empire of Trebizond, a Byzantine Greek state that survived as a Christian holdout until 1461, eight years longer than Constantinople itself, before falling to Mehmed II. The region long kept a notable Pontic Greek and Armenian population, which disappeared with the genocides and the population exchange of the early 20th century. Today the Black Sea is known for its Kaçkar mountains, its tea and hazelnut plantations, and monasteries hanging from cliffs such as Sumela.
On the summit of Mount Nemrut, at more than 2,100 metres, a megalomaniac king had one of the strangest and grandest monuments of antiquity carved two thousand years ago. Antiochus I, ruler of the small kingdom of Commagene in the 1st century BC, ordered the building of his own tomb-sanctuary, crowned by a tumulus of stones and flanked by colossal seated statues of gods and of the king himself, between eight and nine metres high. Over time, earthquakes rolled the heads off the statues, and today they lie separated from their bodies, creating an unforgettable image at sunrise and sunset.
What is fascinating about Commagene is that it was a frontier kingdom, a bridge between East and West. Antiochus claimed descent both from Achaemenid Persian royalty and from the Greek Macedonian kings, and his pantheon mixed Greek and Persian gods on the same altar: Zeus was identified with Ahura Mazda, Apollo with Mithra. Mount Nemrut, a World Heritage Site, is the monumental testimony of that syncretism, the dream of eternity of a king who wanted to sit among the gods on a mountaintop, at the exact point where the Hellenistic world met the Persian one.
The southeast of Turkey is part of Upper Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that is one of the cradles of human civilisation. Here, near Şanlıurfa, Göbekli Tepe was discovered, the oldest monumental sanctuary in the world, raised around 9500 BC by hunter-gatherers millennia before the invention of writing or agriculture, a find that revolutionised archaeology. Şanlıurfa itself (ancient Edessa) claims to be the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham, venerated by Jews, Christians and Muslims.
The whole region is sown with layers of history: it was Assyrian, Urartian, Persian, part of Alexander's empire, Roman and Byzantine, a permanent frontier between Rome and the Persians. Diyarbakır, on the banks of the Tigris, preserves imposing black basalt walls nearly six kilometres long — among the longest in the world after the Great Wall of China — which were raised gradually from Roman times onward. In recent decades, the gigantic Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), with the Atatürk dam and other dams on the Tigris and the Euphrates, transformed the region's farming economy but also flooded historic towns, such as much of the very ancient Hasankeyf, and created tensions with Syria and Iraq over sharing the water.
Perched on a hill above the plains of Mesopotamia, Mardin is one of the most beautiful cities in Turkey, with its honey-coloured limestone houses stepping down the slope and its minarets and bell towers side by side. Its most singular feature is human: Mardin and the neighbouring mountains of Tur Abdin ('the mountain of the servants of God') are one of the historic hearts of Syriac Christianity, one of the oldest branches of the faith, whose faithful still pray in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.
Tur Abdin is dotted with extremely old monasteries, such as Mor Gabriel, founded in the year 397 and one of the oldest still in operation anywhere in the world. For centuries, Muslims, Syriac Christians, Armenians, Kurds, Jews and Arabs lived together in this region in an extraordinary mosaic. That world was devastated in 1915 by the Sayfo, the genocide of the Syriac Christians carried out alongside the Armenian one, which emptied these lands of much of their Christian population; many of the survivors later emigrated to Europe. Today a small but tenacious Syriac community survives, and its thousand-year-old monasteries still stand as witnesses to one of the oldest and most continuous Christian presences on the planet.
Before the First World War, eastern and southeastern Anatolia were the heart of historic Armenia and home to millions of Armenians, as well as Assyrians and Greeks, alongside the Kurdish and Turkish Muslim population. Cities such as Van, Erzurum, Diyarbakır and Bitlis had large Armenian quarters and villages, with churches, schools and monasteries going back more than a thousand years, ever since Armenia became, at the start of the 4th century, the first state in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion.
It was precisely in this region that the genocide of 1915 struck hardest. The deportations and massacres organised by the Ottoman government emptied entire provinces of Armenians and Assyrians; the route of the deportee columns towards the deserts of Syria often started in these lands. In Diyarbakır and its surroundings, the killings were especially systematic. The result was the almost total disappearance, within a few years, of a thousand-year-old Christian presence in its own ancestral land. As explained in the national history, the academic consensus describes these events as genocide, while the Turkish state officially denies it. To travel this region today — with its ruined Armenian churches, such as the cathedral on Akdamar island in Lake Van, restored as a museum — is to look at the mark left by that vanished world.
The southeast of Turkey is today the country's Kurdish-majority region, and its recent history is marked by the so-called Kurdish question. The Kurds are a people with a language of their own and no state, spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria; in Turkey they are the largest minority, estimated at around fifteen million people. After the founding of the republic, Turkish nationalism denied their distinct identity for decades — it went as far as calling them 'mountain Turks' and banning public use of the Kurdish language — and several Kurdish rebellions were harshly put down in the 1920s and 1930s.
Since 1984, the region has been the setting of a long armed conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), a guerrilla group that first demanded independence and later greater autonomy and rights, and which Turkey, the European Union and the United States consider a terrorist organisation. The war has caused tens of thousands of deaths — combatants and civilians — and successive phases of violence, failed peace processes and fresh breakdowns, with a heavy impact on life in the cities of the southeast. It is a complex and sensitive subject, in which legitimate Kurdish cultural and political demands, state repression and military operations, and the armed violence of the insurgency all coexist. Presenting it soberly means acknowledging that complexity without reducing it to a single side or denying the suffering of the civilian population, which has borne the brunt of the conflict.
Istanbul is one of the very few cities in the world that was the capital of two different empires and that spreads across two continents at once. Its history begins around 660 BC, when Greek colonists from Megara founded Byzantium on the headland commanding the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, an unbeatable natural anchorage. For almost a thousand years it was just another Greek city, until in the year 330 Constantine refounded it as Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, and turned it into the richest and most populous city in Europe during the Middle Ages.
In 1453, with the Ottoman conquest, the city changed owners but not rank: it remained an imperial capital, now of the Islamic world, and came to be known more and more by the name Istanbul, made definitively official in 1930, already under the republic. It is a unique case: the same strategic peninsula was the jewel of Rome, of Byzantium and of the Ottoman sultanate, and that is why it packs into a few square kilometres a density of history few cities can match. Curiously, it stopped being the capital in 1923, when the young republic moved the government to Ankara to mark its distance from the imperial past.
No building sums up the layers of Istanbul better than Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya). Inaugurated in 537 by Justinian, for almost a thousand years it was the largest church in Christendom and a feat of engineering, with its gigantic dome that astonished whole generations. In 1453, Mehmed II turned it into a mosque and added minarets; in 1935, Atatürk turned it into a museum, a symbol of the new secular state; and in 2020 Erdoğan's government converted it back into a mosque, a heavily political decision that revived old debates about identity and secularism.
Facing Hagia Sophia, sultan Ahmed I had the Blue Mosque raised in the early 17th century, with its six minarets and its thousands of İznik tiles. Around it unfolds the Ottoman historic centre: Topkapı Palace, residence of the sultans for centuries; the Basilica Cistern, from the Byzantine period; and the Grand Bazaar, one of the oldest and largest covered markets in the world. The historic centre of Istanbul has been a World Heritage Site since 1985 precisely because of this unrepeatable overlay of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman monuments.
The reason Istanbul exists is the water. The Bosphorus strait, barely a few hundred metres wide at its narrowest point, links the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara — and through the Dardanelles with the Aegean and the Mediterranean — and separates Europe from Asia. Whoever controls the Bosphorus controls the passage of all Black Sea trade, and that is why this strip of water has been, for millennia, one of the most coveted positions on the planet.
That strategic importance is still fully alive. The Montreux Convention of 1936 gave Turkey control of the straits and regulated the passage of warships, a treaty that comes back into the news whenever there is tension in the Black Sea. Today, three suspension bridges and an underwater rail tunnel join the two shores and the two continents, and millions of people cross daily between European and Asian Istanbul. The city of the Marmara region is, literally, the place where the Western and Eastern worlds shake hands over the water.
At the southwestern end of the region, near Çanakkale and the entrance to the Dardanelles, rises the hill of Hisarlık, identified since the 19th century with the Troy of the Iliad. Homer's epic tells of the Greeks' ten-year siege of Priam's city to win back Helen, and of the final trick of the wooden horse. For centuries Troy was believed to be pure legend, until the businessman and adventurer Heinrich Schliemann began excavations there from 1871 and dug up walls, treasures and the remains of a real city.
What archaeology revealed was even more fascinating than the myth: not one Troy, but at least nine cities stacked on top of one another (Troy I to IX), inhabited from around 3000 BC to Roman times. One of those layers, destroyed by war or fire around the 13th or 12th century BC, may have inspired the Homeric story. Schliemann's methods were crude and damaged the site — and the so-called 'treasure of Priam' that he carried off turned out to be far earlier than the Trojan War — but he proved there was stone beneath the myth. Today Troy is a World Heritage Site, and a large wooden horse greets visitors as a nod to the legend.
The same strait Homer turned into a mythical stage was, three thousand years later, the setting for one of the bloodiest battles of the 20th century. In 1915, in the middle of the First World War, the Allies tried to force the Dardanelles and take Constantinople by landing on the Gallipoli peninsula (Gelibolu), on the European shore of the strait. The campaign, pushed by Winston Churchill, turned into a disaster: for almost a year, British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops were pinned down on the beaches and hills in front of a stubborn Ottoman defence, with hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides before the Allied withdrawal.
Gallipoli had consequences that went beyond the battlefield. It made a national hero of colonel Mustafa Kemal, whose defence was decisive and who eight years later would found the Republic of Turkey. And for Australia and New Zealand, where thousands of young men died far from home, the campaign became a founding myth: ANZAC Day, every 25 April, is still the most important military commemoration in both countries. Today the cemeteries and memorials of the peninsula — Turkish, British, French and Commonwealth, side by side — make this corner of the Marmara region a place of pilgrimage and reconciliation.
In antiquity, the Mediterranean coast of Turkey corresponded to two neighbouring and very different regions. To the east, around present-day Antalya, was Pamphylia, a fertile plain with prosperous Greek and Roman cities such as Perge, Aspendos and Side, famous for their temples, theatres and aqueducts. To the west, towards Fethiye, stretched Lycia, a mountainous and isolated country inhabited by a people with their own language and culture, the Lycians, who spoke an Indo-European language distinct from Greek and had singular customs.
Both regions passed from hand to hand — Persians, Athenians, Alexander's empire, the Hellenistic kingdoms — until they fell under Rome. The Lycians were famous for their fierce attachment to freedom: when the Persian general Harpagus attacked them in the 6th century BC, the inhabitants of Xanthos preferred, according to Herodotus, to set fire to their city with their families inside rather than surrender, an episode that would be repeated centuries later against the Romans. The Lycian League, a confederation of cities with a system of proportional representation, is considered one of the historical forerunners of federalism, and it even inspired the drafters of the United States Constitution.
Antalya was founded around 150 BC by Attalus II, king of Pergamon, who gave it his name: Attaleia. It later passed to Rome, and from that period it keeps its most famous monument, Hadrian's Gate, a three-arched marble gateway raised for the emperor's visit in the year 130. The old town, Kaleiçi, is a maze of Ottoman lanes enclosed by Roman and Byzantine walls, with restored wooden houses that today are hotels and restaurants.
After the ancient world, Antalya was Byzantine and then, from the early 13th century, it fell into the hands of the Seljuk Turks of the Sultanate of Rum, who made it their main Mediterranean port; from that stage dates its emblem, the Yivli Minare, the red-brick 'fluted minaret'. Finally it passed to the Ottoman Empire. Over the last half century, Antalya has been completely transformed: from a quiet port city to the undisputed capital of Turkey's sun-and-beach tourism, head of a 'Turkish Riviera' that receives millions of visitors a year drawn by its beaches, its waterfalls and the ancient ruins nearby.
Fethiye stands on ancient Telmessos, one of the main cities of Lycia, and its hallmark is the spectacular rock-cut tombs carved into the cliffs above the town. The most famous, the Tomb of Amyntas, from the 4th century BC, imitates the façade of a Greek temple sculpted directly into the rock. These high, almost inaccessible tombs answered the Lycian belief that a winged being would carry the dead to the afterlife, and they are one of the most original legacies of that people.
The region is the gateway to the Turquoise Coast and to the Lycian Way, a famous long-distance trail linking ancient cities along the shoreline. Near Fethiye is the Ölüdeniz lagoon, with its crystal-clear water, and the ghost valley of Kayaköy, a village of stone houses left abandoned after the population exchange of 1923, when its Orthodox Greek inhabitants were expelled to Greece and no one ever occupied it again. Kayaköy, silent and in ruins today, is a moving testimony to that uprooting, which also marked this part of the Turkish Mediterranean.
Few people know that Father Christmas was born on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. In the city of Myra (today Demre), by the sea, there lived in the 4th century a Christian bishop named Nicholas, famous for his generosity and for secretly handing out gifts to the poor, especially to children. Saint Nicholas of Myra became one of the most venerated saints in Christendom, patron of sailors, merchants and children, and his legend — carried by Dutch immigrants as 'Sinterklaas' — ended up giving rise to the modern figure of Santa Claus.
In Demre the Byzantine church of Saint Nicholas still stands, built over his tomb, which was for centuries an important pilgrimage centre. In 1087, merchants from the Italian city of Bari stole a good part of his relics and took them to Italy, where they rest to this day, though some of the bones stayed in Turkey. The Lycian coast holds other jewels near Demre as well: the ruins of Myra itself, with its rock-cut tombs and its theatre, and the sunken harbour of Kekova, an ancient city partly submerged by earthquakes, which you tour by boat.
This rugged coast, full of coves and inlets, was for centuries a refuge for pirates. On the eastern stretch, ancient Cilicia, the corsairs became so powerful in the 1st century BC that they came to threaten Rome's food supply and kidnapped a young Julius Caesar; the general Pompey had to mount a large-scale military campaign to clear the Mediterranean of pirates. The geography that favoured piracy also turned the shoreline into a string of fortresses.
In the Middle Ages, the coast was a frontier between Islam and Christendom. The Crusaders passed along it on their way to the Holy Land and left castles behind; an Armenian kingdom of Cilicia even emerged and became an ally of the Crusaders. Later, Barbary corsairs and the Ottoman fleet fought over these waters with the Christian powers. All that history of defence and assault was carved into the castles dotting the coast — such as the one at Alanya or the one rising from the sea at Kızkalesi — today the tourist backdrop of a region that for millennia lived with one eye on the horizon, watching who was arriving by sea.