Turkey People

The people of Turkey are generally friendly and welcome visitors.  This is partly because the country recognises that tourism is a key income earner.  The government has institutionalised this by creating a tourism police force to protect tourists.  Visitors to Istanbul will see their obvious presence in tourist areas such as Sultanahmet.  People who harass visitors will likely be subject to just punishment.

However, like most countries, there are bad apples especially in the retail trade and restaurants business, when touts may act rather aggressively.  This can happen in big cities and even in small towns like Kusadasi where a shop selling Turkish Tea tried to charge a highly inflated price and refused to be rebuffed.  This was a bad case, but could have been reported to the tourism police for action.

As for the origin of the Turkish people, in Turkey, a Turk is "any individual within the Republic of Turkey, whatever his faith who speaks Turkish, grows up with Turkish culture and adopts the Turkish ideal is a Turk."  This is somewhat different from saying that the person belongs to the Turk ethnic group.

While it is said that over 80% of the people in Turkey claim themselves to be ethnic Turks, there is some debate about this based on the findings of various studies about the genetic origins of present-day Turks.

Ethnic Turks migrated into Turkey mainly after the invasion of the Seljuk Turks from Persia and their defeat of the Byzantines in 1071.  Therefore, the Turkish language obviously originated from this source.  However, the genetic make-up of the population is blurred by the events of history as the Turks came later than most other invaders and migrants.  Turkey had its indigenous inhabitants such as Hittites from ancient times, and people of many races also moved into the region from time immemorial and stayed there in long stretches: Persians, Greeks, Celts, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Kurds, Armenians and others.  

It is interesting that the Ottomans saw themselves less as Turks than the embodiment of a much larger enterprise, treating all races rather equally and in fact had a preference for Caucasian women in the harems.  Even some foreigners saw the Ottoman empire as European, like Peter the Great's assertion of the Ottomans being the sick man of Europe.  It has been claimed by some that many Turkish people have some dose of non-Turkish blood; of course this is a matter for geneticists to work on.

It was after 1923 that the racial mix of the population became less blur with the mass exchange of population when over one million Greeks left and about half a million Turks came into the new Republic of Turkey.

Other ethnic groups in the country include the Kurds, who have inhabited eastern Turkey, Syria and Iran for several thousand years ago; the Jews, who came to Turkey following persecution by the Christian church in Spain in the 16th century, as well as a small number of Armenians and Greeks.