Turkish people: Encyclopedia II - Turkish people - The Modern Turks

Turkish people - The Modern Turks

Ultimately, it is absurd to speak of any ‘Turkish race’ 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, is no longer accepted by most 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 Russia and the Caucasus such as the Tatars and Azerbaijanis. These Turks share similar languages and cultures, while individual Turks may identify with distinct parentage as well such as being part-Circassian or part-Arab etc.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Modern Turks", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki