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
Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace exchange between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. According to Presidential Decree no. 167 (2 September 2005), the Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace was made up of the following departments: Since the "Metapolitefsi", there have been twenty Ministers for Macedonia and Thrace from two parties, New Democracy and PASOK. The first to assume the post following the fall of the military junta in 1974 was Nikolaos Martis. Stavros Kalafatis served as the last minister before the ministry's abolition upon the election of George Papandreou in 2009. The ministry was re-established on 21 June 2012 after the election of Antonis Samaras,