TURKS

Ethnic group living in Turkey; also used to refer to Turkic-language speakers in Central Asia.

Turks are an ethnolinguistic group living in a broad geographic expanse extending from southeastern Europe through Anatolia and the Caucasus Mountains and throughout Central Asia. Thus Turks include the Turks of Turkey, the Azeris of Azerbaijan, and the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tatars, Turkmen, and Uzbeks of Central Asia, as well as many smaller groups in Asia speaking Turkic languages. In a legal sense, however, Turks refers only to citizens of Turkey, even those (up to 20% of the population) who are not ethnically Turkish.

Nomadic Turks began infiltrating into Iran from Central Asia as early as the eighth century. Although the initial contacts generally were peaceful, by the tenth century large groups of Turks were invading Iran, and in the eleventh century they began invading Anatolia. First the Seljuk Turks and subsequently the Ottoman Turks established kingdoms in Anatolia. The Ottomans conquered the Byzantine imperial capital Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, and this city then became the center of the Ottoman Empire, which at its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spanned three continents. Although the Ottoman Empire was multiethnic, Europeans often referred to its subjects as Turks and used "Ottoman Empire" synonymously with "Turkey."

During the nineteenth century, some Ottoman/Turkish intellectuals began to advocate panTuranism, a movement to unite all Turkic-language peoples under the Ottoman Empire. After the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the government rejected pan-Turanism as an official policy. Nevertheless, interest in the cultural, if not political, unity of Turkic peoples has been a strong current among intellectuals in Turkey and has been revitalized since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence in Central Asia of several new Turkic-speaking countries.

see also anatolia;istanbul;turkey; turkish language.

Bibliography

Yavuz, M. Hakan. "Turkish Identity Politics and Central Asia." In Islam and Central Asia: An Enduring Legacy or an Evolving Threat? edited by Roland Sagdeev and Susan Eisenhower. Washington, DC: Center for Political and Strategic Studies, 2000.

eric hooglund