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This article is about the ethnic Turks of Turkey. For information on residents or nationals of Turkey, see Demographics of Turkey. Refer to the disambiguation page Turk for other uses of the term.

The modern Turks of Turkey are an amalgamation of a wide variety of peoples including indigenous Anatolians and migrants from the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Levant, Central Asia and various other places. Mainly, what is debated about the Turks of Turkey involves how much of a relationship they have with other Turkic peoples and their neighbors which may give insights into the whether or not most Turks are mainly Greek and Armenian converts who were ‘turkified’ over time or invaders from elsewhere, most notably Central Asia. Historians, anthropologists, and geneticists have all made contributions that require some explanation as to who the Turks of Turkey are.

A brief historical overview

The country of Turkey has been the site of wide variety of empires and has literally been a crossroads for much of Eurasia. Some of the earliest known inhabitants include the Hattites who were quite possibly an aboriginal people of Anatolia. They were followed by the Hittites, an Indo-European people from the steppes of modern Russia and the Ukraine, who merged with the local population. Later invaders included Phrygians, Lydians, Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds, Greeks, Romans, Galatians, Byzantines, Mongols, and of course Turkic tribes. It is perhaps not inconceivable that each of these invaders and groups contributed to the modern identity of the Turks, but not in an equitable manner. Ultimately, the linguistic contribution of the Turkic tribes cannot be ignored. The Oğuz were the main Turkic people who moved into Anatolia after 1000 CE (following the Battle of Manzikert that resulted in victory for the forces of Alp Arslan and defeat for the Byzantines) as they gained political and military dominance in the region but remained for centuries (demographically speaking) a relatively small part of the population. Anatolia, which was formerly a part of the Byzantine Empire, was (and still is) especially an ethnically very mixed region where the official religion was Greek Orthodox, with many adherents of other Christian churches or syncretist movements, as well as Jews and the formerly Zoroastrian and Christian Kurds. Over time, as word spread regarding the victory of the Turks in Anatolia, more Turkic ghazis arrived from the Caucasus, Arab lands, and Central Asia. These groups in turn merged with the local inhabitants (who were, at the time, largely Greek, Armenian, and Kurdish) as a slow process of conversion to Islam took place, thanks in large measure to the efforts of the sufis, that helped to bolster the Turkish-speaking population. While most historians believe that the actual migration of Turks was relatively small, genetic testing has revealed that as much as 30% of the gene pool is derived from Central Asian Turks.] These migrations and later populations movements would continue to impact the modern Turkish people as the rise of the Ottoman Empire made Turkey into a world power and a focal point for a wide variety of peoples. Following invasions of Europe, numerous Balkan peoples either moved to Turkey or were brought to Turkey as slaves as were people from throughout the Arab world, the Caucasus, Eurasia, and North Africa. Fairly limited sub-Saharan ancestry appears to have penetrated Turkey due to the use of eunuchs but is not by any means absent, while the contribution of the Roma appears more substantial following their migration into and through the region. While perhaps less than one-third of those who self-identify as ethnic Turks in Turkey today are predominantly of Altaic origin, the remainder are actually an amalgamation of Turkified Greeks, Armenians, Roma, Georgians, Kurds, Slavs, Assyrians and other peoples. Islam spread slowly over many generations either through voluntary or forced conversions; many poor families chose to become Muslims in order to escape a special tax levied on conquered millet peoples or for reasons of upward mobility. Another common motivation was to escape the devşirme system for recruiting Janissaries to the Ottoman forces, and the similar institution of using dhimmi children to serve as odalisques or köçeks in the Ottoman harems or as tellaks in the hammams. Conversion to Islam was usually accompanied by the adoption of Ottoman-Turkish language and identity and eventual acceptance into the mainstream population, because conversion was generally irreversible and resulted in ostracism from the original ethnic group. An exception is the the Hamshenis, Armenian Christians converted to Islam in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, still keep some Christian traditions and retain the use of two distinct Armenian dialects but reject Armenian ethnic or national identity whereas their Laz neighbours name them "Ermeni", the Turkish term for Armenians. There are also some Pontic Greek-speaking Muslims. Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic welcomed altogether USSR and later the war-torn Afghanistan, Balkan Muslims, either Turkish-speaking or Bosniaks, Pomaks, Albanians, Greek Muslims etc., fleeing either the new Christian states hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of • Spanish and Portuguese Jews after 1492; • political and confessional refugees from Central Europe: Russian schismatics in XVII-XVIIIth centuries, Polish and Hungarian revolutionaries after 1848, Jews escaping the pogroms and later the Shoah, White Russians fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Russian and other socialist or communist revolutionaries, Trotskyists fleeing the USSR in the 1930's; • Muslim refugees (Muhajir) from formerly Muslim-dominated regions invaded by Christian States, like Tatars, Circassians and Chechens from the Russian Empire, Algerian followers of Abd-el-Kader, Mahdists from Sudan, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kirghizs and other Central Asian Turkic-speaking peoples fleeing the or later the Communist regimes, in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria for instance.

The Modern Turks

Ultimately, it is absurd to speak of any ‘Turkish race’, even more so in the tangled ethnic web of Anatolia. Race as a genetic-based social category that is in any case a concept of the XIXth century, no longer accepted by social scientists. As a matter of fact, most present-day Turks are the offspring of all sorts of populations whose original languages have sometimes been extinct several centuries ago. Among the Black Sea Turkish intellectuals there have been in the last few years a revival of interest for the forgotten ethnic and religious identities of many ancesters who feared to pass on any non-Turkish or non-Muslim traditions to their children from fear of a rehearsal of past massacres and genocides. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Black Sea website based on the research by Özhan Öztürk, but also the books of Ömer Asan and Selma Koçiva (see also her site at http://www.lazuri.com/ only in Turkish and Laz languages) are good illustrations ot this trend, unthinkable 5 years ago and still under attack of (right- and left-wing) Turkish nationalists who label it as pure "national treason" and "betrayal of Atatürk's heritage". There have also been through the XIXth and XXth centuries, and still nowadays, rumors of the existence, mostly in rural and small town areas, of large populations of Crypto-Christians and Crypto-Jews, notably among the Dönme, descendents of Sabbatai Zevi's followers who had to convert en masse following Zevi's example. The Turks of Turkey can be broken down into a variety of segments and the majority of self-identifying Turks include four main groupings: Rumelian Turks who are mostly of Balkan origin, Anatolian Turks who compose the bulk of ethnic Turks found in Anatolia, Central Asian Turks who remain a large segment of the population that has been moving to Turkey for centuries, and Eurasian Turks from the Russia and the Caucasus such as the Tatars and Azerbaijanis. These Turks share the same language and roughly the same culture, while individual Turks may identify with distinct parentage as well such as being part-Circassian or part-Arab etc.

Turkish phenotypes and problems with classification

While the majority of Turks do bear a common brunette Mediterranean appearance similar to that of neighboring countries, there are large visible exceptions that are a testament to the legacy of population movements into the region. People walking in a Turkish street or watching a Turkish movie can see Turks of about all physical types prevalent in the country, from the blond haired and-blue-eyed to the Asiatic Mongol individuals, and even people with some partial black African roots, from the times when the Ottoman Empire stretched into Sudan. Turkey, like so many other vast former imperialist powers such as the Romans and the British, in part reflects its imperial past. Proving the difficulty of classifying ethnicities living in Turkey, there are as many classifications as the number of scientific attempts to make these classifications. Turkey is not a unique example for that and many European countries (e.g. France, Germany) bear a similar ethnic diversity. So, the immense variety observed in the published figures for the percentages of Turkish people living in Turkey (ranging from 75 to 97%) totally depends on the method used to classify the ethnicities. Complicating the matter even more is the fact that the last official and country-wide classification of spoken languages (which do not exactly coincide with ethnic groups) in Turkey that was performed in 1965 and many of the figures published after that time are remain static estimates. It is necessary to take into account all these difficulties and be cautious while evaluating the ethnic identity of the Turks of Turkey. A possible comprehensive list of ethnic origins for Turks living in Turkey could be as follows (based on the classification of P.A. Andrews (1), however this book is more like a review and depends on other people's publications): 1. Turkic-speaking peoples: Kirghizs, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kumyks, Yürüks, Uzbeks, Tatars, Azeris, Balkars, Uighurs, Karachays. 2. Kurds and Zazas 3. Arabs and Assyrians 4. Georgians and Laz 5. Armenians and Hamshenis 6. Greeks, Pontic Greeks and Greek-speaking Muslims 7. Other Muslim groups originally from the Balkans (Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbians, Croatians, Romanians and Bosniaks): These people migrated to Anatolia during the Ottoman Era as well as following recent upheaveals in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia and most have been assumed to accept a Turkish-Muslim identity. 8. Circassians and Chechens 9. Others: There are small groups and individuals from all over the world living in Turkey, either remnants of past migrations (there is for instance a village near the Bosphorus named Adampol in Polish, Polonezköy, "the Polish village", in Turkish) or witnesses of contemporary mass migrations towards the European Union and its periphery (there are also illegal migrants camps with thousands of Africans and others intercepted while trying to embark, or swimming from the wreckage of overpopulated small boats, for the Greek or Italian shores).

See also

• Balkan Turks
• Turkish Cypriots
• Oghuz Turks
• Ottoman Turks
• Ottoman Turkish language
• History of ethnic Turks of Turkey

• Turkish people
• Ethnic groups of the Middle East
• Turkic peoples
• Ethnic groups of Europe