Turkish people: Encyclopedia II - Turkish people - A brief historical overview

Turkish people - 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 Hattians also known as Hattis, 2500-2000 BCE, who were quite possibly an aboriginal people of Anatolia. They were followed by the Hittites, 2000-1750 BCE, 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 1072 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.[9] 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 1930s;
• 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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "A brief historical overview", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki