POPULATION 67,308,928
SUNNI MUSLIM 84 percent
ALEVI AND OTHER MUSLIM 15 percent
OTHER (ARMENIAN APOSTOLIC, CHALDEAN, GREEK CATHOLIC, JACOBITE, JEWISH, PROTESTANT, ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN, ROMAN CATHOLIC) 1 percent

Country Overview

Introduction

The Republic of Turkey was formed after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Geographically its lands lie mostly in Anatolia, or Asia Minor, with an extension into Thrace in the southeastern Balkan Peninsula.

The Ottoman Empire was religiously more mixed than is present-day Turkey, containing substantial Armenian and Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities as well as smaller, more unusual groups, such as the Yezidis and the Zoroastrians. Each of these minority groups, however, have experienced a significant decrease in numbers—albeit under different circumstances—during the last hundred years. Mutual conflict, deportation, and unrest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to the almost complete disappearance of the Armenians. After the formation of the Turkish republic, a population exchange...