
Located halfway between Europe and Asia, the Turkish nation is profiled on Destination Turkey on Nations Online. The Republic of Turkey is a small enclave in Thrace in the Balkan region of Southeast Europe and the Anatolian peninsula in western Asia.
Turkey has coastlines on the Black Sea in the north and the Mediterranean Sea in the south and east. It shares borders with Iraq and Syria to the southeast, Georgia to the northeast, Bulgaria and Greece to the northwest, and Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan (at the exclave of Nakhchivan) to the east. Turkey has a land area of 783,562 km2, making it slightly smaller than the combined size of Texas and Louisiana in the United States or more than twice the size of Germany.
The population of Turkey is 83.2 million (as of 2020); Istanbul is the largest city, and Ankara is the capital. Turkish (the official language) is spoken, along with Kurdish and Arabic, by Turkish Arabs.
The Turkish Republic, a nation with a rich history and culture, is situated where Asia, Africa, and Europe—the three ancient world continents—are most closely related and span the point where Europe and Asia converge. The history of mainland Anatolia has been shaped by the mass migration of many peoples due to its physical location.
Anatolia, the site of countless civilizations, has produced a singular synthesis of cultures, each with a unique personality but bound together by unbreakable strands. As a contemporary country in a historic region, Turkey is now the custodian and inheritor of such a vital piece of humanity's shared legacy.