Turks Erotic

The Turks are an Oghuz Turkic people whose modern identity was shaped, more than anything, by a long migration west out of Central Asia and the centuries of empire that followed. They are the demographic core of the Republic of Turkey, but the category bleeds well past those borders: Turkish Cypriots in the north of Cyprus, Meskhetian Turks scattered by Stalin-era deportation across the former Soviet space, the semi-nomadic Yörüks of the southern Anatolian uplands, and large settled communities in the Balkans and across western Europe — Germany above all, where postwar guest-worker recruitment built a Turkish presence now several generations deep. Anatolia itself is the through-line: a peninsula of dry plateau, mountain rim, and two long coastlines that has been, in turn, Hittite, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman, with each layer still legible in the place-names and the food.

Turkish belongs to the Oghuz branch of the Turkic family, closely related to Azerbaijani and Turkmen and mutually intelligible with them in stretches; it is agglutinative, vowel-harmonic, and famously resistant to direct translation into Indo-European syntax. The language went through one of the twentieth century's more aggressive engineering projects under Atatürk — a 1928 switch from Arabic to Latin script and a sustained purge of Arabic and Persian loanwords in favor of Turkic coinages — which is why a Turk reading Ottoman documents from a century ago needs help, while a Turk reading a modern Azerbaijani newspaper largely does not. Most Turks are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, but a substantial minority, perhaps a fifth of the population, are Alevi, a heterodox tradition with its own ritual life, music, and historical relationship to Shi'ism that sits uneasily with Sunni orthodoxy. The official secularism inherited from the early republic remains a live political question rather than a settled one.

Day-to-day, what tends to mark Turkish life is a particular weight given to hospitality and to the household — the obligation to feed a guest properly, the elaborate grammar of tea-drinking, the kinship terms that extend into neighbors and shopkeepers. Coffeehouse culture, the meyhane, the public bath, the wedding-week customs that vary sharply between the Aegean coast and the eastern provinces — these still organize a great deal of social time. Regional difference inside Turkey is genuine and not decorative: a Black Sea villager, an Istanbul professional, and a southeastern farmer share a state and a language but not always much else.