Turkey is situated where Europe and Asia meet. The area of the country is 780.000 sq. km. It is made up of European part (Thrace) and Asian part (Anatolia), seperated by the Bosphorus, the Marmara Sea and the Dardanelles. At its widest point, Turkey is 1565 km accross. The neighbour countries are Bulgaria and Greece at the west, Russian Federation at the north, Armenia and Georgia at the north east, İran at the east, Iraq and Syria at the south. The state is secular and a multyparty democrasy is exist. Economy is based on agriculture with a rapidly developping industry.
The first people in Turkey who left an evidence were Stone Age people who lived in the Karain caves in Antalya in the south west, about 2 million years ago. In about 9000 BC the tribes began forming into states and Anatolia saw settlement by many civilizations: the Hittites, the Celts, the Phyrigians, the Persians, the Hellenic Greeks, Alexander the Great's armies and the Romans. They left a rich archeological heritage, with city states like Gordion, Ephesus, Milllete and Troy.
When the Roman empire was divided in 395 AD, the Eastern part became the Byzantine Empire, with its capital at Constantinople (İstanbul).
In about 900 AD the Seljuk Turks began moving into Anatolia. The Turkish Ottoman dynasty established its capital at Bursa. After 400 years of conflict with the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet the Conquerer finally captured Constantinople in 1453, and Anatolia became an Islamic empire. The Ottoman Empire eventually covered Iran, North Africa, Arabia, the Balkans and Eastern Europe.
The Ottoman Empire fell into decline by the nineteenth century, unable to modernize. Despite military successes in the First World War at Gallipoli, the defeat of Turkey's German allies led to its occupation by French, British, Greek and Italian soldiers, with Greece annexing İzmir. The Turkish general Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) left the army in 1919 to begin a long and hard liberation war against the occupiers. He started the Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1920. The occupiers and the Ottoman Emperor were forced to leave and on 29th October 1923 the Turkish Republic was proclaimed, with Ankara as its capital and Atatürk as its first president.
