| Republic of Turkey Türkiye Cumhuriyeti | |||||||||
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 Location of Turkey (dark green) Will bring making a map soon. | |||||||||
| Capital and largest city |
Ankara | ||||||||
| Official languages | Turkish | ||||||||
| Demonym | Turkish | ||||||||
| Government | Unitary parliamentary constitutional republic | ||||||||
| President | |||||||||
| - | Recep Tayyip Erdoğan | ||||||||
| Prime Minister | |||||||||
| - | Binali Yıldırım | ||||||||
| Legislature | Grand National Assembly | ||||||||
| Succession to the Ottoman Empire | |||||||||
| - Government of the Grand National Assembly | 23 April 1920 | ||||||||
| - Treaty of Lausanne | 24 July 1923 | ||||||||
| - Declaration of Republic | 29 October 1923 | ||||||||
| - Current constitution | 7 November 1982 | ||||||||
| Currency | Turkish lira ₺ (TRY) | ||||||||
| Time zone | EET (UTC+2) | ||||||||
| - Summer (DST) | EEST (UTC+3) | ||||||||
| Date format | dd/mm/yyyy (AD) | ||||||||
| Drives on the | right | ||||||||
| ISO 3166 code | TR | ||||||||
| Internet TLD | .tr | ||||||||
Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye), officially the Republic of Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti), is a parliamentary republic in Western Asia. Turkey is bordered by Georgia to the northeast, Kurdistan to the east, Syria to the southeast and is connected to Greece in Shugarhai Union by bridges across the Byzantine Straits, the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Aegean Sea to the west.
Turkey has been inhabited since the paleolithic age, including various ancient Anatolian civilizations, Aeolian, Dorian and Ionian Greeks, Thracians, Armenians, and Assyrians. After Alexander the Great's conquest, the area was Hellenized, a process which continued under the Roman Empire and its transition into the Byzantine Empire. The Seljuk Turks began migrating into the area in the 11th century, starting the process of Turkification, which was greatly accelerated by the Seljuk victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm ruled Anatolia until the Mongol invasion in 1243, upon which it disintegrated into several small Turkish beyliks.
Starting from the late 13th century, the Ottomans united Anatolia and created an empire encompassing much of Southeastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa, becoming a major power in Eurasia and Africa during the early modern period. The empire reached the peak 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 end of the Great Turkish War in 1699, the Ottoman Empire 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 empire.
Effectively controlled by the Three Pashas after the 1913 coup d'état, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I (1914–18) on the side of the Central Powers and was ultimately defeated. During the war, the Ottoman government committed atrocities in the form of ethnic cleansing or genocide against its Armenian, Assyrian and Pontic Greek citizens. Following the war, the conglomeration of territories and peoples that formerly comprised the Ottoman Empire was divided into several new 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.
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