Turkey

The lands that form modern Turkey have been continuously inhabited since deep antiquity, and Anatolia is among the cradles of settled civilisation. Neolithic sites such as Catalhoyuk and the ceremonial complex at Gobekli Tepe document early agriculture and monumental architecture from the ninth and seventh millennia BCE. By the second millennium BCE the central plateau was dominated by the Hittite Empire, which contended with Egypt and Mesopotamian powers before collapsing around 1200 BCE. Successor states including Phrygia, Lydia, Urartu, and the neo-Hittite kingdoms shared the peninsula with Greek colonies along the Aegean coast. Persian Achaemenid rule gave way to the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, after which Hellenistic kingdoms such as Pergamon and Pontus held sway until Roman expansion absorbed the region during the late Republic and early Empire.

After the partition of the Roman world, Anatolia became the heartland of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, with Constantinople as its capital from 330 CE. Byzantine authority was challenged from the seventh century by Arab incursions and, more decisively, by the arrival of Turkic peoples from Central Asia. The Seljuk victory at Manzikert in 1071 opened the plateau to Turkic settlement and produced the Sultanate of Rum. Out of the post-Seljuk emirates rose the House of Osman in the late thirteenth century. The Ottomans absorbed neighbouring beyliks, crossed into the Balkans, and took Constantinople in 1453 under Mehmed II, ending the Byzantine state. Under Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent the empire expanded across the Levant, Egypt, the Hejaz, North Africa, and southeastern Europe, becoming one of the great early modern powers and the seat of the Sunni caliphate.

From the late seventeenth century the empire entered a long period of contraction and reform. The Tanzimat edicts of the nineteenth century modernised administration, law, and education, while territorial losses accelerated in the Balkans and the Caucasus. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 restored the constitution; the empire then entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers. Defeat brought the Armistice of Mudros in 1918, Allied occupation, and the partition outlined in the Treaty of Sevres. During this period the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek populations of Anatolia suffered mass deportations and killings whose characterisation remains contested.

A national resistance led by Mustafa Kemal, later Ataturk, defeated invading forces in the Turkish War of Independence and secured international recognition through the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923 with its capital at Ankara, the caliphate was abolished in 1924, and a programme of secular, Westernising reforms reshaped law, script, dress, and education. Turkey remained neutral through most of the Second World War, joined the United Nations in 1945, and entered NATO in 1952. Multiparty politics, established in 1946, was punctuated by military interventions in 1960, 1971, and 1980, and by a postmodern coup in 1997.

Customs union with the European Union followed in 1995, and accession negotiations opened in 2005, though they have since stalled. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has governed since 2002 under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, surviving an attempted coup in July 2016. A 2017 constitutional referendum replaced the parliamentary system with an executive presidency, which took effect after the 2018 elections. Turkey today is a unitary presidential republic with a unicameral Grand National Assembly.