Türkiye

Anatolia holds Troy, Ephesus, Pergamon and Nicaea, where the creed common to all Christendom was formulated in 325. Constantinople was for a thousand years the largest Christian city in the world; Hagia Sophia remains the architectural model of the dome on pendentives, imitated from Venice to Istanbul.

Anatolia is one of the cradles of civilisation: Çatalhöyük, the Hittites, the Greek cities of Ionia where pre-Socratic philosophy was born. Constantinople, founded in 330, became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and remained so for a thousand years.

The Ottoman conquest of 1453 transferred that heritage to an empire that reached Vienna in the sixteenth century and dominated three continents. Its nineteenth-century decline fed the “Eastern question” that structured European diplomacy.

The Republic was founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal on a programme of secularisation and Westernisation. A member of the Council of Europe from 1949 and of NATO since 1952, Türkiye signed an association agreement with the EEC in 1963 and obtained candidate status in 1999; negotiations, opened in 2005, have been effectively frozen since 2018.