62
votes
Accepted
Is rye bread Turkish?
Q Is rye bread Turkish?
Are Swedes Africans?
If you find the 'African Swedes' question senseless, then you see the level of absurdity the ad is playing on. If you answer 'Swedes are Africans' in the ...
40
votes
Is rye bread Turkish?
Well rye itself (the grain) appears to have first been domesticated in Anatolia, around 6,500 BC. So of course Neolithic people there (modern Turkey) would have been the first to make rye bread.*
As ...
37
votes
Accepted
Why did the Turks adopt the Latin alphabet after WWI?
Two reasons: to increase literacy by simplifying the language, and to cut ties with the past (ie. the Ottomans) and forge a new secular Turkish identity.
The Ottoman Turkish alphabet, a variant of ...
26
votes
Accepted
Did the Seljuk consider themselves Roman?
I think the other answer misses some crucial distinctions.
Culture
The culture of the Seljuks was non-Greco-Roman; the same applies to their language. A good summary of who they were comes from ...
25
votes
Accepted
Did the Axis try to "bribe" Turkey into joining them during World War II?
Short Answer
German policy was geared towards keeping Turkey neutral (preferably 'friendly neutral'); the Turkish leaders' determination to remain neutral was evident to the Nazi ambassador to Turkey ...
21
votes
Why didn't Germany attack Turkey during WW2?
I've had similar questions over the years, and did some research on this. Let me admit, though, my interest comes from a different angle. I was originally thinking why didn't the USSR invade Turkey ...
16
votes
Is there a relationship between Gobekli Tepe and Stonehenge?
As others have pointed out in various comments, a connection between the two sites is extremely unlikely. In particular, Stonehenge became a cultural center only around 3100 BCE, 5000 years after ...
15
votes
How did Azerbaijan come to be allied with Turkey and Israel?
Turkey and Azerbaijan are historically the same nation. The slogan is "one nation two states". So Sunni/Shia difference is not very important. Both countries also have important economic ...
13
votes
Was it not clear to the WWI allies that they were over-reaching with the treaty of Sevres?
You are correct, the Turkish National Movement heavily resisted treaty of Sevres which culminated in the Turkish War of independence...the treaty didn't last long.
Isn't it obvious that that treaty ...
13
votes
How did Azerbaijan come to be allied with Turkey and Israel?
Your reading of how alliances work is a bit too on the nose.
Religious and political links are a major factor. But they definitely aren't the only one. The word 'technically' is misapplied here.
...
11
votes
Did gun control in Turkey in 1911 lead to the Armenian Genocide?
As a matter of fact, I found the source, although curiously it does not say exactly what people quoting it seems to imply:
Some slightly better informed claims directed to article 166 of Turkish ...
10
votes
Why are Turkish people and other Turkik people considered of Mongolic race if their language is not in the Mongolic language family?
There's no scientific definition of "race", so that part of the question is unanswerable.
Linguists do try to classify languages though, since that can be done (mostly) objectively, based on ...
10
votes
Accepted
Is Makarios III's harsh quote on Turkish Cypriots accurate?
The exact quote or close variants of it never show up with a proper source attribution. That is usually a sign that those typing these words cannot name one. And I tend to dismiss all of these cases ...
10
votes
Accepted
What were the racial views of the Nazis towards the Greeks?
Hitler and the Nazis admired ancient Greeks, who they considered "Nordic" conquerors (thus justifying Nazi Germany co-opting classicism). Their modern descendants, however, not so much. Nazi ...
9
votes
Why were Muslims in Western Thrace and Christians in Constantinople excluded from the population exchange?
Not a full answer, but I expect it to be useful until a better one shows up.
Most of Greeks expelled from Turkey weren't expelled after the exchange was accorded but they were already in Greece (...
8
votes
Accepted
Why did not UK assist Greece in 1919 war?
Is the question: "Why did the Great Britain not assist Greek expansionism in the Aegean (specifically Asia Minor/Anatolia) at the expense of the Turks?"
Well Jon Custer's comment that war-weariness ...
8
votes
Accepted
What are the current obligations of Treaty of Lausanne?
Of course, many stipulations of the treaty are still in effect. The borders it delimited remains the international border of today. The Republic of Turkey continues to be recognised internationally. ...
8
votes
Accepted
Why was religion used as the basis of Turkey-Greece population exchange instead of language, ethnicity, etc.?
Ataturk was not the architect of this exchange. The idea of protecting minorities in former Ottoman Empire came from the western Allies - according to the wiki article on the Lausanne Conference, ...
8
votes
Why was there such tension between the Ottoman Empire and Russia during the Armenian genocide?
When you do research on the subject, even on a very basic level, you should know that at the time of Armenian genocide, the Ottoman Empire was in the state of WAR with Russian empire. This war is ...
7
votes
Why are Turkish people and other Turkik people considered of Mongolic race if their language is not in the Mongolic language family?
First, Turkish people are not in general considered of Mongoloid race, neither are Turkic-speaking Azeris. These two peoples are usually classified to belong to Europoid race with maybe only admixture ...
7
votes
What happened to those ethnic Greeks who converted to Islam during the Ottoman empire?
They melted in with the local population. In Turkey there's no such notion of pure race. I'm from a village located within the Black Sea region of Turkey. We have bazaar which are in ruins today left ...
7
votes
How did Turkey achieve such a quick military rebound after World War I?
As @Tom Au mentions, the newly found Republic of Turkey was led by Mustafa Kemal, later named Ataturk, or the Father of the Turks. Why was he named like this? Well, i'm glad you asked:
He was a ...
7
votes
Accepted
Why did the USA revoke the arms embargo or sanction on Turkey only after 3 years of the invasion of Cyprus?
Turkey was and to a certain degree still is of pivotal strategic importance for US interests in the region. As a member of NATO,Turkey, among other considerations:
controls access between the Black ...
6
votes
What happened to Muslim spouses who converted to Christianity during the 1923 Graeco-Turkish population exchange?
Officially, If you were a Muslim in Greece, you could be exempt from compulsory deportation if you were:
part of the ethnic Albanian community
a resident of Thrace
The Greek government had placed no ...
6
votes
What happened to those ethnic Greeks who converted to Islam during the Ottoman empire?
Although many of the Muslims in Greece were deported to Turkey, some ended up in other places.
In Crete, most of the Muslims were Greeks who had converted. There was a massacre by Greek nationalists ...
6
votes
Why did the Turks adopt the Latin alphabet after WWI?
The people of the fallen Ottoman Empire and of Turkey up until then had used Arabic script, the same script in which the Islamic Quran is written in. One of the main reasons that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ...
6
votes
Accepted
What are the ruins in Turkey near Kömürcü Köyü?
@tohuwawohu and @NSNoob seem to have nailed this in comments. The link from vici.org has Neo-Hittite ruins at 38.259163,34.541790:
and OP's coordinates are in blue for comparison:
The former claims ...
6
votes
Accepted
Did the Ottomans conquer Poland-Lithuania?
Now I have done my research and now I understand. Stephen Bathory was elected as king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania and remained so for 10 years. In the same year he also became the prince of ...
5
votes
What percentage of modern day Turks are of Bulgarian/Circassian/Greek/Serbian descent?
I am not sure if it is possible to define a percentage of the population as descendants, as it is quite challenging to define a descendant of one ethnic group scientifically, when you also need to ...
5
votes
Accepted
How did NATO handle the military coups and juntas in Greece, Turkey and Portugal?
NATO stayed out of the way; and they "consulted"
Article 4
The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of
them, the territorial integrity, political independence or ...
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