Learning about Turkey

The flights over were blissfully uneventful; the hotel in Izmir beautiful. In the evening we met our guide Ugoz (pronounced just “Ohz”) and one another, nineteen travelers: five husband and wife teams (husbands mostly pastors), one pastor and partner team, one pastor father and teenage son team, four men traveling alone, not all pastors (one RV guy from Chicago, a pastor from D.C., and one from West Virginia, and a quiet man from California), and one woman traveling alone—that’s me. 

The group is quite varied denominationally—from independent and Baptist churches to UMC and UCC. One couple is from Australia, one from the Dominican Republic by way of New Jersey. Others are from Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota, Oregon, and Georgia.

I realized last night how ignorant I was (am) about Turkey. The language looked like nothing I’d ever seen—Western letters with lots of extra markings, umlauts on vowels and other diacriticals on consonants, but not like the Scandinavian ones. Not much is recognizable at all except loan words, and the sound is very different from anything I’ve heard before. So I did some wide-awake 3:00 a.m. reading, which I hope not to repeat tonight. Here is some of what I learned. Because I keep falling asleep over this tonight I may have to correct it later.

It hasn’t been called Turkey very long. The Greeks called it Anatolia, meaning “east” or “sunrise.” The Romans called it Asia Minor, as in the New Testament. Like Palestine, this area has been conquered and reconquered throughout history. The Assyrians claimed it in the third millennium B.C.E. Hittites came to prominence from the 18th century to about 1180 B.C.E. Soon the Greeks colonized the western coast. Some say that Homer was born in Smyrna (Izmir), and his works reflect knowledge of western Anatolia.

Anatolia was taken by Cyrus of Persia in the fifth century, then by Alexander the Great of Greece in the third. It succumbed to all the turmoil after he died, and some parts welcomed Rome in the second century B.C.E. Constantine moved his capital from Rome to Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople, in the fourth century C.E. Both Nicea and Chalcedon are very close to Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, at the mouth of the Black Sea).

When the Muslim Arabs began conquering the Middle East in the seventh century they tried to take Anatolia, but the Byzantine Empire kept reasserting control. But when the Seljuk Turks showed up they took over, and the country is nearly all Muslime today.

The Turks were from central Asia: western China and Siberia. (They also live today in many former Soviet countries: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and others.) They had become Muslim before they took over Anatolia in the eleventh century. The language came with them. Their coming also inspired the onset of the crusades and the habit of drinking “Turkish” coffee. According to Wikipedia, DNA studies show that most modern Turkish people are not descendants of the conquerors but of the indigenous people, but I have the impression they had rather not be. 

The Ottomans soon came into control, and they were in charge of a vast region until they were defeated in World War 1. The Turkish Republic was born of a revolt that threw off the colonizing powers in the early 1920s. The first president, Mustafa Kemal (with the honorific title Attatürk), was a reformer, who replaced the original Turkish script with Latin letters. Thus a language that has little relationship to European ones, even though it looks like one.