Turkey Turkey, is one of the oldest permanently settled regions in the world. Various ancient Anatolian populations have lived in Anatolia, from at least the Neolithic period until the Hellenistic period. Many of these peoples spoke the Anatolian languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European language family. In fact, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical centre from which the Indo-European languages radiated. The European part of Turkey, called Eastern Thrace, has also been inhabited since at least forty thousand years ago, and is known to have been in the
Thrace (theme) the Palaiologan period, but it is still encountered in some historians of the time as an antiquarian term. Thrace (theme) The Theme of Thrace () was a province ("thema" or theme) of the Byzantine Empire located in the south-eastern Balkans, comprising varying parts of the eponymous geographic region during its history. Traditionally, it has been held that the theme (at the time primarily a military command) was constituted in c. 680, as a response to the Bulgar threat. This is based on the mention of a certain "patrikios" Theodore, Count of the "Opsikion" and "hypostrategos" of Thrace, in 680/681. However,