Turkey

Turkey occupies about 780 square kilometers. Approximately 97 percent of its land area lies in Asia, on an extended peninsula called Anatolia. The country has seas on three sides: The Black Sea on the north, the Aegean on the west, and the Mediterranean to the south. The straits of the Bosphorous and the Dardanelles, which along with the Sea of Marmara link the Black Sea to the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, is an important international waterway and is completely under Turkey's control. Turkey borders on Greece and Bulgaria in the west, on the republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the north, and Syria, Iran, and Iraq to the east. This significant geographical location places Turkey amid the Balkans, the states of the former Soviet Union, Central Asia, and the Middle East, and has forced Turkey to be an active player in geopolitics.

Over the past fifty years, Turkey has also absorbed waves of immigrants and refugees in large numbers. In this context, recent immigrants have come from the Balkans, as well as those who fled the political turmoil in Iran in the 1980s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Iraq after the Gulf War in 1990. Turkey is the centerpiece of a very unstable region, both geographically and politically, and its institutions have shown remarkable resilience in dealing with an unending series of crises.

Turkey's gross national product (GNP) per capita is estimated to be about $2,986 U.S. (SIS 2000). The economy is based mostly on agriculture, along with the construction industry, mining, textiles, and tourism. Turkey's chief exports include cement, citrus fruits, cotton, figs, hazelnuts, hides and leather goods, minerals, sultana raisins, textiles, and tobacco. Its chief imports are chemicals and related products, natural gas and crude oil, electrical and transportation equipment, rubber, and plastics. The percentage of households below poverty line is estimated to be 14.2 percent (SPO 1997).

About 35 percent of the population lives in rural areas, and 65 percent in urban areas. However, the rate of urbanization has been so rapid that sociologists have defined this process as "the ruralization of towns and cities." The three most populous cities of Turkey are Istanbul, Ankara (the capital), and Izmir. The population of Istanbul rose from about five million in 1965 to over ten million in 2000. There is also a small population of nomadic pastoralists, but their numbers, never high, are decreasing rapidly as animal husbandry loses its economic significance, and urban areas steadily expand. The country has eighty-one provinces and is divided into seven regions that feature significantly different climatic, economic, and social conditions. These are the Marmara, the Aegean, the Mediterranean, Central Anatolia, the Black Sea, Eastern Anatolia, and Southeastern Anatolia. This diversity is also reflected in the dynamics of regional family structures, which adds to the complexities in the rapidly expanding urban configurations.