Geography of Turkey part of Turkey accounts for 95% of the country's area. It is also known as Asia Minor, Asiatic Turkey or the Anatolian Plateau. The term Anatolia is most frequently used in specific reference to the large, semiarid central plateau, which is rimmed by hills and mountains that in many places limit access to the fertile, densely settled coastal regions. The European portion of Turkey, known as Thrace (), encompasses roughly 3% of the total area but is home to more than 10% of the total population. Istanbul, the largest city of Thrace and Turkey, has a population of 11,372,613. Thrace
Demographics of Turkey remain in Turkey following the 1923 population exchange, which involved the forcible resettlement of approximately 1.5 million Greeks from Anatolia and East Thrace and of half a million Turks from all of Greece except for Western Thrace. After years of persecution (e.g. the Varlık Vergisi (1942–1944) and the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955), emigration of ethnic Greeks from the Istanbul region greatly accelerated, reducing the 120,000-strong Greek minority to about 7,000 by 1978. The 2008 figures released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry places the current number of Turkish citizens of Greek descent at the 2,000–3,000 mark. According to Milliyet there are