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
Turks of Western Thrace usually insisted that the basis of identification of a minority is religious and not ethnic (or national). Thus Greek officials refer to the Muslim minority in Greece as Greek Muslims, who were based mainly in Western Thrace. Muslim communities also lived in Greek Macedonia, Epirus, and Crete (see Cretan Turks) and were the descendants of Ottoman-era Greek converts to Islam who joined the Turkish Millet (Ottoman Empire). However, these particular communities were relocated from Greece to Turkey following the Population exchange signed between the two countries in 1922-23, with only the Greek Muslims of Western Thrace exempted from it. Successive