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
Population exchange between Greece and Turkey Population exchange between Greece and Turkey The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey (, ) stemmed from the "Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations" signed at Lausanne, Switzerland, on 30 January 1923, by the governments of Greece and Turkey. It involved at least 1.6 million people (1,221,489 Greeks from Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus, and 355,000 Muslims in Greece), most of whom were forcibly made refugees and "de jure" denaturalized from their homelands. The population exchange was envisioned by Turkey as a way to formalize, and make permanent, the exodus of