The official language of Turkey is Turkish which is spoken by the overwhelming majority of the population, the main exception being elderly women…
The first Luwian-speaking Lycians appeared on the scene in the 13th century BC. Fiercely independent, like most of the coastal peoples they found…
Little is known about the Candaroğlu dynasty who governed the area around Kastamonu in the 14th and early 15th centuries. In 1292 their…
The son of an Islamic scholar, Celaladdin Rumi (1207-1273) is better known to the world as Mevlana. A sufi, or Islamic mystic, Rumi was…
The Selçuk Turks tend to play second fiddle to the fashionable Ottomans, which is a great shame since they were responsible for some…
The Ahis are a group of medieval mystics who have been described as the Muslim equivalent of the Masons because, like the Masons, they were…
Hacı Bektaş Veli was a Sufi thinker, originally from Khorasan in Iran, who arrived in Hacıbektaş (then the village of Sulucakarahöyük) in Central Anatolia some…
According to the World Bank, the population of Turkey was 85 million in 2022. Roughly 75% of the population now lives in towns,…
In the Middle Ages, the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia (Lesser Armenia) occupied much of the area north of the eastern end of the…
The Turkish archaeologist Halet Çambel (1916-2014) was one of those people whose life seems to have been designed to make the rest of…