Raw material matters….
From Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World:
…The German Turks in my queue for a 1998 workers’ charter flight to Berlin seemed a tribe apart from other queues filled with more sophisticated-looking Istanbul businessmen and holiday-makers. They were indeed of different origin, since Turkey had sent village folk to work in Germany, wanting to give industrial training to is rural underclass...The men were short, stock Anatolian types, wearing baggy trousers, clipped beards and gruff expressions, a pre-1980 rural style….
Do you recommend the book?
check it out from the library. too much of a “travel book” for me, but he knows turkish and there are lots of interesting facts in it.
That part of Turkey which lies in Europe was, of course, taken by conquest and is populated by a large number of citizens whose provenance is Caucasian or a mixture thereof.They exert considerable influence in the matter of Turkey’s pro-EU self-image but are not racially representative of the country’s overall population.
That part of Turkey which lies in Europe was, of course, taken by conquest and is populated by a large number of citizens whose provenance is Caucasian or a mixture thereof.They exert considerable influence in the matter of Turkey’s pro-EU self-image but are not racially representative of the country’s overall population.
this a purely facile observation, all of turkey was taken by conquest from the byzantines. the highest estimate i’ve seen of turks as being non-caucasian (that is, not mediterranean) is 30%, with more common numbers around 10%. non-anatolian turks from the balkans have settled all over turkey proper, just like anatolian greeks have settled throughout greece. and, i suspect you do not know that ankara in the anatolian heartland is generally considered more modern and pro-european that istanbul on the bosphorus?
Turks have long been known among “middle easterners” as being light of color. I can’t immediately produce the sources, (perhaps Razib can) but Arabs would sometimes compare Europeans to Turks for their pale skin, and the Somalis at first thought the English were Turks–you might find this odd tidbit in the memoires of Lawrence of Arabia (and Turks had treated Somalis very badly, so they were terrified.) Whatever their origins, Turkey-ites have long been among the paler-faces of the world, although many, many, of course, are more typically “middle eastern” looking. Hungarians are supposed to be “Magyars” but I have yet to see more than an occasional one who looks to be of golden horde steppe origin.
btw, Doesn’t”Caucasian” refer to a race in the sense of phenotype more than color. This “people of color” banner is getting really over done. When I was growing up, middle easterners, Persian or Arab, and even many people of the Indian sub-continent, were described as “Caucasian.” Obviously they had characteristics different from Europeans, but the basic look was there. Or so the World Book Encyplopedia told me.