Turkey

III

People and Society of Turkey

The population of Turkey is 76,805,524 (2009 estimate). The average population density is 100 persons per sq km (258 per sq mi). Urbanization has progressed rapidly in recent decades. In the mid-1970s, Turkey was still a predominantly rural society, with nearly 60 percent of its citizens living in the countryside. In 2005, 67 percent of the people lived in urban areas. The highest population concentrations are in İstanbul and in coastal regions.

A

Turkey’s Principal Cities

İstanbul is the largest city in Turkey, with a population of 11,174,257 (2007 estimate). It is the country’s primary cultural, financial, manufacturing, and tourism center, as well as its largest port. Ankara, the capital, has a population of 3,428,000 (2003 estimate). İzmir, population 2,409,000 (2000), is the country’s second largest port, as well as a major industrial and tourism center. Adana, population 395,388 (2007 estimate), is the main industrial center of the south, as well as the home of the İncirlik air base, an important North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) facility. Bursa, population 459,877 (2007 estimate), is an ancient city in western Anatolia that served as the first capital of the Ottoman Empire. The modern city is a manufacturing center.

Turkey has four other cities with populations exceeding 500,000. These are Gaziantep (217,505), Konya (546,739), Mersin (539,607), and Antalya (661,661). Each of these cities has grown rapidly in recent decades as migrants from rural areas have arrived seeking work in the proliferating factories. Other important cities are Kayseri (population 269,835), Diyarbakır (605,325), Eskişehir (482,793), Şanlıurfa (381,938), Samsun (363,180), and Malatya (381,081).

B

Ethnic Groups in Turkey

About 80 percent of the people of Turkey identify themselves as ethnic Turks. Before 1900, the population of Anatolia and Eastern Thrace was more ethnically diverse, with Turks making up about 55 percent of the total; another 30 percent were Armenians and Greeks. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several forced movements of populations resulted in the removal of most Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia. Replacing them were non-Turkish Muslims, including Albanians and Bosnians, who were forced to leave newly independent countries in the Balkan Peninsula. These countries were established out of former provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In the same period, thousands of Muslim Circassians from Russia’s Caucasus region also immigrated to Turkey to escape religious persecution in Russia. Most Balkan and Circassian Muslim immigrants were assimilated as Turks within one generation. Turkey has continued to welcome Muslim immigrants from former Ottoman areas in southeastern Europe and from Turkic-speaking regions of the Caucasus and Central Asia, taking in some 350,000 Muslim refugees between 1989 and 2000.

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The Kurds are Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, comprising about 17 percent of the country’s total population. Their historical homeland encompasses 11 provinces in southeast Turkey, which borders the Kurdish-populated regions of Iran, Iraq, and Syria. More than half of all Kurds live in southeastern Turkey. The ancient city of Diyarbakır on the Tigris River, a major urban area in the southeast, has been a Kurdish cultural and political center since Ottoman times. In the late 1960s, many Kurds began migrating from southeastern Anatolia to İstanbul and the industrial cities of central and western Anatolia, as well as to Germany.

Ethnic conflict between Kurds and Turks increased after 1923 following the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, which implemented uniform national educational and social policies. The Kurds especially resented official efforts to discourage use of the Kurdish language and the banning of Kurdish political parties. In 1984 the Kurdistān Workers Party (PKK) launched an armed uprising against the Turkish government. The PKK’s aim was to create a separate Kurdish state. Its guerrilla war against the Turkish military continued in the rural regions of southeastern Anatolia for 15 years until it declared a ceasefire in 1999. The ceasefire lasted nearly five years. Fighting resumed in 2004 when the PKK said it was forced to renounce the ceasefire to respond to attacks by the Turkish military.

Arabs comprise the third largest ethnic group in Turkey. They are concentrated in the southern Mediterranean province of Hatay, with smaller communities in the adjacent provinces of Adana to the north and Gaziantep to the east, as well as in the two westernmost provinces of the southeast. Arabs constitute less than 2 percent of the country’s total population.

Several smaller ethnic groups also live in Turkey. The Laz are a non-Turkic Muslim community who live along the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Muslim Georgians live in northeastern Turkey in the mountainous region bordering the Republic of Georgia. Small communities of Armenians and Greeks still reside in İstanbul. Turkey’s small population of Ladino-speaking Jews are the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 during the Inquisition.

C

Language in Turkey

The official language of Turkey is Turkish (see Turkish Language). Turkish belongs to the Altaic superfamily of languages that are spoken in most of central and northern Asia. About 15 percent of the population speaks a different primary language, usually Kurdish or Arabic.

In a major language reform initiated in 1928, Turkey adopted a modified Latin alphabet in place of the Arabic script that had been used for centuries to write Turkish. The objective of this reform was to make literacy in Turkish easier to achieve, as the reformers believed that Arabic inadequately represented the sounds of Turkish vowels. Between 1932 and 1950, the official Turkish Language Society made a concerted effort to purge the Turkish language of loanwords from Arabic, Persian, and other foreign languages.

D

Religion in Turkey

Religious freedom is guaranteed by the Turkish constitution, and there is no official state religion. About 99 percent of Turkey’s people are identified as Muslim, or followers of Islam. However, Muslim identity in Turkey is complex because there are multiple interpretations of Islam. Secular Muslims, for example, insist that religion is strictly a private matter for each person. This secular view informs Turkish law, which forbids the wearing of religious garb except by authorized religious leaders in places of worship or during religious services. Nonsecular Muslims generally believe the state has a hostile attitude toward religious institutions and practices, and have called for official neutrality.

The vast majority of Turkey’s Muslims, or about 80 percent of the population, are followers of Sunni Islam, the larger of the two main branches of Islam. However, there is no uniform definition of the principles of Sunni Islam, and several interpretations of Sunni theology are practiced within Turkey. About 20 percent of Turkish Sunnis practice various types of Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism. Some Sufis adopt liberal, secular views on religion while others are quite conservative.

Alevi Muslims constitute another important Islamic group in Turkey. Alevis practice a distinct form of Shia Islam, the second main denomination of Islam. Alevis are distinguished from other Shia groups by having no authoritative religious texts, other than the Qur’an (Koran), which set forth their distinctive beliefs. The Alevi religion thus is based on oral traditions and its tenets are kept secret from non-Alevis. Alevis experienced periodic persecutions during the final centuries of Ottoman rule, leaving a legacy of suspicion toward government among Alevi communities. Most Alevis are ethnic Turks, although they also include significant numbers of Kurds and Arabs. Strict Sunnis consider Alevi theology as heretical, and religious riots that erupted in the late 1970s and early 1990s left many Alevis dead.

Turkey is home to a variety of other heterodox Islamic groups. They include Twelve Imam Shia Muslims; Yazidis, a sect that combines elements of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and paganism; and the Donme. The Donme descend from the followers of a 17th-century Jewish convert to Islam who established a religion that includes beliefs from Islam and Judaism.

Although Christians made up a substantial religious community during the Ottoman Empire, fewer than 100,000 Christians live in Turkey today, and their numbers continue to decline due to emigration. Both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches maintain ecclesiastical offices in İstanbul. Emigration similarly has reduced Turkey’s once large Jewish population, which today numbers fewer than 20,000.

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