Turkey

From Neolithic Çatalhöyük and the Hittites through Byzantium and the Ottomans to Atatürk's republic.

The land of modern Türkiye carries one of the world's deepest human pasts: the Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük, the Bronze Age Hittite empire centred on Hattusa, and the legendary city of Troy. Greek, Roman and then Byzantine Anatolia made Constantinople a Christian imperial capital for a thousand years, until the Seljuk victory at Manzikert (1071) opened the peninsula to Turkic settlement. From a frontier principality founded around 1299, the Ottoman dynasty rose to take Constantinople in 1453 and to rule a vast empire that peaked under Süleyman the Magnificent. The empire's long decline ended in the catastrophe of the First World War, the Armenian Genocide of 1915–16, and partition — out of which Mustafa Kemal Atatürk forged a national movement that won the War of Independence and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923.