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Turkey / Türkiye |
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The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923. The capital is Ankara. The
population is about 65 million and the land area is 780 thousand square
kilometres. Turkey is situated in West Asia, and shares borders with Georgia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran in the east, Iraq and Syria on the south, Greece
and Bulgaria on the north-west. It is surrounded by the Black Sea to the north,
Aegean Sea to the west and Mediterranean Sea to the south. The climate is temperate with hot and dry summers and mild and wet winters. The winters grow harsher towards the east and the interior. The terrain is mostly mountains with narrow coastal plains. The Anatolian Plateau is a high, central Plateau. 30 % of the land is arable and 26% is made up of forests. Another 12% is meadows and pastures. Its main natural resources are antimony, coal, chromium, bauxite, mercury, copper, borate, sulphur and iron ore. The economy of Turkey is diversified with a strong industrial base in textiles and food processing and main crops of wheat, barley and sugar beet in agriculture. Turkey is in some ways the most Western country in the Middle East, with Latin writing (Turkish was written with Arabic letters until the fall of the Ottoman Empire), an almost secular state, and strong affiliations with Europe. At the same time, a city like Istanbul is a grand monument of the heydays of Oriental culture's supremacy, and there is a significant political change going on in Turkey right now (but not as radical as promised during the electoral), where a fairly unsuccessful politics of copying Europe is altered, and more attention is directed to the Muslim world. |
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