Türkiye

What the Turkish state decided about itself

Nearly every fixed point a reader uses to place Türkiye carries a date and a legal instrument. The Grand National Assembly proclaimed the republic on 29 October 1923 and named Ankara its capital, 480 kilometres from Istanbul, which had been the Ottoman capital since Mehmed II took Constantinople on 29 May 1453. Ankara had 5,803,482 inhabitants on 1 January 2023, within a national population of 85,372,377 at the end of that year.

The constitution holds several of these in place. Article 174 of the text of 1982 lists eight reform laws passed between 1924 and 1934, the alphabet and the numerals among them, and states that no provision of the constitution may be read as making them unconstitutional. Article 4 forbids even proposing an amendment to the first three articles, which fix the republican form of the state, the language, the flag, the anthem and the capital.

The name took the longest. The Government of the Grand National Assembly adopted Türkiye Devleti, State of Turkey, in 1920, and the name entered an international document for the first time in the Treaty of Alexandropol that December. The republic of 1923 took the name Türkiye Cumhuriyeti. The official English form stayed Republic of Turkey until May 2022, when the Turkish government asked the United Nations and other international organisations to use Republic of Türkiye. Türkiye: history follows the assembly that made these choices, and the culture article follows what the alphabet law did to the crafts written in the older script.

How the ground under Türkiye keeps moving

Most of Türkiye stands on the Anatolian Plate, a block of crust that the northward push of the Arabian Plate drives slowly west. Two strike-slip faults bound it. The North Anatolian Fault follows the Black Sea side of the country and broke near İzmit on 17 August 1999, in a magnitude 7.4 earthquake that killed more than 17,000 people. The East Anatolian Fault broke on 6 February 2023 at magnitude 7.8, and a second shock of 7.7 followed that afternoon further north. The disaster agency AFAD counted some 280,000 buildings severely damaged or reduced to rubble.

The Wikipedia account of the country places around 70% of the population in the two zones of greatest seismic risk. In 2026 the state geological survey, MTA, published a renewed Active Fault Map compiled from field mapping at a scale of 1:25,000, intended for regional hazard analysis.

The same compression folded two mountain systems along the coasts: the Pontic ranges above the Black Sea and the Taurus above the Mediterranean. Between them lies a high interior where about a quarter of the surface stands above 1,200 metres and much of the water drains to salt lakes with no outlet. In the east the two systems merge, and Mount Ararat rises near the borders with Armenia and Iran, to 5,137 metres in the country's record and 5,165 metres in Britannica.

Eastern Thrace, the European part, covers 3% of the surface and holds around 15% of the population. The Bosporus, about 25 kilometres long, separates it from Anatolia, and Istanbul sits on both shores. The area of the whole is 783,562 km² in the country's record and 769,604 km² in Britannica. The geography article goes through the faults, the plateau and the straits in turn.

Where the Ottoman state ended and the republic began

Anatolia carried states long before it carried Turkish ones. Göbekli Tepe is close to 12,000 years old, the Hittites ruled from Hattusa between about 1700 and 1200 BC, and Constantine made Byzantium the capital of the Roman Empire in 324. Seljuk rule followed the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, and the Ottoman state founded by Osman I around 1299 lasted more than 600 years.

Its end came through a war and a treaty. The Ottoman state entered the First World War in 1914 on the side of the Central Powers. The deportation of the empire's Armenians to Syria during and after that war is described in the History of Turkey account as "now broadly recognized by scholars as the Armenian genocide", with estimates of the dead from about 600,000 to 1.5 million; the Turkish government refuses that description and states that Armenians were "relocated" from the eastern war zone.

The Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920 would have divided much of Anatolia and was never ratified. An assembly that opened in Ankara on 23 April 1920 fought the war that replaced it with the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923, abolished the sultanate on 1 November 1922 and the caliphate on 3 March 1924. A new constitution followed in 1924, another in 1961 after the coup of 1960, and the present one after the coup of 1980, approved by 91.37% on 7 November 1982.

Why president and assembly face voters together

The constitution was amended again by referendum on 16 April 2017, and the change took effect with the elections of 24 June 2018. The office of prime minister was abolished and executive power passed to the president. The president and the 600-seat Grand National Assembly are now elected on the same day every five years, and an early election, called by the president or by 360 deputies, renews both offices together. A party needs 7% of the national vote to enter the assembly, and alliances can carry smaller parties over that line.

Türkiye is a unitary state of 81 provinces and 973 districts, and Article 127 gives the centre "administrative tutelage" over elected local bodies. Türkiye: politics sets out what the assembly kept, how far a presidential decree can reach and who appoints the judges.

Its memberships face several ways at once. Türkiye joined the Council of Europe on 9 August 1949 and NATO in 1952, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in 1969, the customs union with the European Union in 1995 and the G20 in 1999. It opened accession negotiations with the European Union in October 2005 and joined the Organization of Turkic States in 2009. Türkiye recognises the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, declared in 1983, and no other state does; this catalogue records that position and takes none of its own.

What two growth rates say about the Turkish economy

TurkStat's accounts for 2025, released on 31 August 2026, give two growth rates for the same year: 3.7% in volume and 41.6% in lira. The gap is price change. The IMF puts average consumer price inflation at 34.9% in 2025, after 72.3% in 2022, and any Turkish figure quoted in lira carries that rate inside it.

The dollar figures depend on the conversion. The World Bank gives output per head of 18,599 dollars in 2025 and TurkStat 18,103 dollars for the same year; at purchasing power the World Bank figure is 45,288 dollars. Unemployment was 8.5% in 2025 by the World Bank's count and the Gini coefficient 43.7 in 2023.

Manufacturing contributed 15.6% of output at current prices in 2025. Automobiles, electronics, textiles, steel and household appliances are among the main industries, and Turkish manufacturers have raised exports inside the customs union with the European Union since 1995. In October 2021 foreign currency made up around half of all bank deposits. Tourism revenue, published in dollars, reached 65.23 billion in 2025. Türkiye: economy works through the inflation years, the energy bill and the gap between western and eastern provinces.

Which practices the republic closed and later listed

Article 3 of the constitution makes Turkish the language of the state, and Article 42 bars any other language from being taught to Turkish citizens as a mother tongue. Kurds were estimated at almost one-fifth of the population at the start of the twenty-first century, and legal changes in the 2000s allowed Kurdish to be used in public and taught. KONDA estimated in 2006 that 99.4% of the population was Muslim, and estimates of the Alevi share collected by Minority Rights Group International run from 10% to 40%.

The reform laws of the 1920s reach into present-day culture. Act No. 677 closed every dervish lodge on 30 November 1925, and UNESCO inscribed the Mevlevi Sema ceremony for Türkiye in 2008. The alphabet law of 1928 moved written Turkish out of Arabic letters, and Hüsn-i hat calligraphy was inscribed in 2021. By September 2026 UNESCO listed 32 elements of intangible heritage for Türkiye, among them coffee culture, the Karagöz shadow play and Kırkpınar oil wrestling at Edirne. Türkiye: culture reads these listings against the laws that preceded them.

Who crosses the Turkish border as a visitor

TurkStat counted 63,917,057 departing visitors in 2025, and 11,175,394 of them, 17.5%, were Turkish citizens living abroad, most of whom came to see relatives and friends. Package holidays go mainly to the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts around Antalya, Bodrum and Marmaris. UNESCO's World Heritage List held 22 properties for Türkiye in September 2026, from the Historic Areas of Istanbul in 1985 to Sardis and the Lydian tumuli of Bin Tepe in 2025.

Turkish clocks stay on UTC+3 all year, prices are in Turkish lira and the international dialling code is +90. Türkiye: travel explains how the border count mixes holidays with homecomings, and where the seasons favour the coasts or the plateau.