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Anatolia
Asia Minor, the peninsula that has always carried the traffic of continents
Anatolia is the great rectangular peninsula that makes up the Asian bulk of Turkey, about 97 percent of the country's territory, bounded by the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean and cut off from Europe by the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles. Its eastern limit is the vague one: some draw it at the Euphrates, some at the Armenian Highlands, some simply at Turkey's modern border. The Greeks called it Anatole, the east, and the Romans Asia Minor, names that describe it from somewhere else. It is also not the same thing as the Anatolian Plateau, the arid tableland filling its interior; the plateau is one feature of a far more varied peninsula.
Two mountain ranges fence that plateau in: the Pontic Mountains along the wet Black Sea coast, where tea and hazelnuts grow in what amounts to a temperate rainforest, and the Taurus along the Mediterranean. Between them the central tableland sits at 800 to 1,200 meters, dry and largely treeless, holding the salt flats of Lake Tuz and the volcanic tuff of Cappadocia eroded into fairy chimneys. The land climbs east to the Armenian Highlands and the extinct volcano of Mount Ararat, at 5,137 meters the highest point in Turkey. Both the Euphrates and the Tigris rise here. The peninsula rides a tectonic plate being squeezed westward, which is why the North Anatolian Fault delivers catastrophic earthquakes.
Settled life may have begun on this ground. Gobekli Tepe, in the southeast, was raising monumental stone circles around 9500 BCE, before pottery or farming, and Catalhoyuk was a town of thousands by 7000 BCE. Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians — who struck the first coins — Greeks, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks, and Ottomans each ruled here in turn, and the ruins of all of them are still in the fields. Turkic migration after 1071 gradually made the peninsula Turkish-speaking and Muslim, while the Armenian genocide and the 1923 population exchange with Greece ended a Christian presence of nearly two millennia. Some 72 million people now live in Anatolia, most of them in cities running from Ankara through Konya and Izmir to the sprawl of Istanbul on the strait.