A short history of Türkiye
Türkiye has been home to many civilizations. This short history explains the main periods and shows where you can still see them.
Before the Ottomans
Anatolia is a stack of civilizations, not a single story. The Hittites built a capital at Hattuşa and signed one of the world’s first recorded peace treaties. Troy, on the Dardanelles, has nine settlement layers. Phrygians, Lydians, Urartians and Ionian Greeks added roads, coinage, temples and cities; the Library of Celsus at Ephesus and the theatre at Aspendos are later Roman chapters in the same landscape.
Rome and Byzantium
Rome called the region Asia Minor and connected it with roads, aqueducts and cities. When Constantine moved the imperial capital to Byzantium in 330 CE, the city became Constantinople. Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, completed in 537, was the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years. Byzantine churches, monasteries and fortresses still sit across Cappadocia, Trabzon, Istanbul and the Black Sea coast.
Seljuks, Mongols and beyliks
The Seljuk victory at Manzikert in 1071 opened Anatolia to Turkic rule. Konya became a Seljuk capital and the home of Rumi, whose followers shaped the Mevlevi tradition. Caravanserais such as Sultanhanı linked trade routes; Mongol campaigns after 1243 fragmented power into smaller beyliks. One of those, the Ottoman beylik in the northwest, began to expand in the 14th century.
The Ottoman centuries
The Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 and made it the capital of an empire that stretched from the Balkans to the Indian Ocean. Suleiman the Magnificent’s reign (1520 to 1566) left mosques, bridges and law codes; Mimar Sinan’s Selimiye in Edirne and Süleymaniye in Istanbul are its signatures. The empire was not a single culture: millets, guilds, Sufi orders and trade networks made it plural, unequal and complex. The 19th-century Tanzimat reforms tried to modernise it; nationalism and the First World War broke it apart.
War and independence
The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers. Gallipoli in 1915 became a defining battle; the war’s end brought occupation and the collapse of the old order. Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun on 19 May 1919, organised congresses and opened the Grand National Assembly in Ankara in 1920. The War of Independence ended with the Lausanne Treaty in 1923 and the proclamation of the Republic on 29 October 1923. Ankara became the capital; the caliphate was abolished in 1924; the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script in 1928; women gained the vote in 1934.
The Republic to today
The young republic invested in railways, schools and industry, then stayed out of the Second World War. Multi-party politics arrived in 1950; the second half of the century was marked by rapid urbanisation, migration to Europe and three military coups (1960, 1971, 1980). In the 2000s, EU accession talks, infrastructure projects and a growing tourism sector changed the country again. The 2023 earthquakes in the south caused deep loss and rebuilding continues. Modern Türkiye is urban, young, connected and regionally diverse, and its history is visible on almost every street.
Where to see it
History is not only in museums. These places put you inside the story.
Civilizations
Anatolia is a layered map of peoples, kingdoms and empires. These guides connect the civilizations that shaped Türkiye to the regions, provinces and monuments where you can still see their legacy.
View allCompiled from public historical sources and official heritage records. This is an editorial overview, not an academic history; follow the links on heritage pages for detail.