Turkish people: Encyclopedia II - Turkish people - Turkish phenotypes and diversity

Turkish people - Turkish phenotypes and diversity

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).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Turkish phenotypes and diversity", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki