Talk:People of Turkey

Latest comment: 16 years ago by Lambiam in topic Redirect

Pictures edit

These must be merged, with People of Turkey. Currently they are beyond stub level. May be later they can be divided--Ugur Basak 15:06, 21 January 2006 (UTC)Reply

There's just too many pictures. I suggest we store them somewhere in wikicommons. More to be said later. AucamanTalk 09:57, 20 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

Irrelevant parts edit

I deleted these paragraphs because I think they are somehow irrelevant to the article. This paragraphs can be part of other independent articles. However, I bring them below to make sure about other editors idea. Feel free if you want to add any part of it again, but please merge it with the article:


These migrations and later populations movements would continue to impact the modern Turkish people as the rise of the Ottoman Empire made Turkey into a world power and a focal point for a wide variety of peoples. Following Ottoman invasions of southeastern Europe, numerous Balkan peoples either moved to Turkey or were brought to Turkey as slaves as were people from throughout the Arab world, the Caucasus, Eurasia, and North Africa. Fairly limited sub-Saharan ancestry appears to have penetrated Turkey due to the use of eunuchs but is not by any means absent, while the contribution of the Roma appears more substantial following their migration into and through the region [citation needed] .

While perhaps less than one-third of those who self-identify as ethnic Turks in Turkey today are predominantly of Altaic origin [citation needed] , the remainder are actually an amalgamation of the pre-existing populations in Anatolia. Islam spread slowly over many generations either through voluntary or forced conversions. Some reasons for conversion included poor families choosing to become Muslims in order to escape the special tax levied on conquered millet peoples and for reasons of increased social status. Another common motivation was to escape the devşirme system for recruiting Janissaries to the Ottoman army. Conversion to Islam was often accompanied by the adoption of the Ottoman-Turkish language and identity and eventual acceptance into the mainstream population, because conversion was generally irreversible and resulted in ostracism from the original ethnic group.

Various exceptions to this includes the Hamshenis, Armenian Christians converted to Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries, who still kept some Christian traditions and retained the use of two distinct Armenian dialects but reject Armenian ethnic solidarity (although their Laz neighbours name them "Ermeni", the Turkish term for Armenians). There are also some Pontic Greek-speaking Muslims along the coast of the Black Sea.

Throughout its history, the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish republic welcomed many persecuted peoples. These people came from a wide variety of places such as: the former USSR and later war-torn Afghanistan, the Balkans, either Turkish-speaking or Bosniaks, Pomaks, Albanians, Greek Muslims etc., fleeing either the new Christian states hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of

Spanish and Portuguese Jews after 1492; political and confessional refugees from Central Europe: Russian schismatics in XVII-XVIIIth centuries, Polish and Hungarian revolutionaries after 1848, Jews escaping the pogroms and later the Holocaust, White Russians fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Russian and other socialist or communist revolutionaries, Trotskyists fleeing the USSR in the 1930s; Muslim refugees (Muhajir) from formerly Muslim-dominated regions invaded by Christian States, like Tatars, Circassians and Chechens from the Russian Empire, Algerian followers of Abd-el-Kader, Mahdists from Sudan, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kirghizs and other Central Asian Turkic-speaking peoples fleeing the Communist regimes, in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria for instance , or even after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Redirect edit

I have proposed to redirect this page to Demographics of Turkey. Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Turkey‎#People of Turkey.  --Lambiam 23:53, 9 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

So done.  --Lambiam 17:58, 16 October 2007 (UTC)Reply