About Turkey
General Information About Turkey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye), officially the Republic of Turkey (Türkiye Cumhuriyeti (help·info)), is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in Southwestern Asia and the Balkan region of Southeastern Europe. Turkey borders eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Iran and the Nakhichevan exclave of Azerbaijan to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. In addition, it borders the Black Sea to the north; the Aegean Sea to the west and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Turkey also contains the Sea of Marmara that is used by geographers to mark the border between Europe and Asia, thus making the country transcontinental.[1] Due to its strategic location straddling Europe and Asia, Turkey has been a historical crossroad between eastern and western cultures.

Turkey is a democratic, secular, constitutional republic whose political system was established in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War. Since then, Turkey has increasingly integrated with the West while continuing to foster relations with Eastern world. It is a founding member of the United Nations,[2] the OIC,[3] the OECD[4] and the OSCE,[5] a member state of the Council of Europe since 1949[6] and of the NATO since 1952.[7] Since 2005, Turkey is in accession negotiations with the European Union, having been an associate member since 1964.[8]