History of Turkey

When Turkish President Erdogan converted the Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque in the summer of 2020, he said the prayer himself like an Ottoman sultan, demonstrating Turkey as an Islamic country. The Republic of Turkey, built on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, has repeatedly redefined its identity in the course of its hundred-year history: Under the military regime after 1980, the nation-state, which Atatürk forced to be secular and European, strived for a Turkish-Islamic synthesis; after 1990, it saw itself as the leading power of all Turkic peoples; at the turn of the millennium, it saw itself as a future member of the European Union; and today, it seeks to close ranks with the formerly Ottoman-dominated Arab world. Maurus Reinkowski tells the story of Turkey along the lines of its domestic and foreign policy upheavals, masterfully illustrating the social, economic and cultural tensions that continue to shape the country between Orient and Occident to this day.