Location and Geography. Turkey occupies Asia Minor and a small portion of Europe. Its area is 301,382 square miles (814,578 square kilometers). It is bounded
on the west by the Aegean Sea; on the northwest by the Sea of Marmara, Greece, and Bulgaria; on the north by the Black Sea; on the east by
Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran; and on the south by Iraq, Syria, and the Mediterranean. Although Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) is the major
city and was the capital of the Ottoman Empire, the first president - Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - chose Ankara, an interior Anatolian city, as the capital in
1923. Militarily Ankara was less exposed and more easily defended than Istanbul. The choice also symbolized Ataturk's policy of nationalism, because
Ankara was more Turkish and less cosmopolitan than the old capital.

Turkey has 4,454 miles of coastline. The interior consists of mountains, hills, valleys, and a high central plateau. The western coastal plains are generally
more densely populated and industrial than are the central and eastern regions, except for Ankara on the central Anatolian plateau. Because
Asia Minor had been home to Lydians, Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks, and Ottomans over the centuries, it is dotted with historic monuments.

Physiographically, the country may be divided into five regions. The Black Sea region has a moderate climate and higher than average rainfall. It is
dominated by the Pontic mountain range. The west is noted for agriculture, including grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and tobacco. In the more
humid east, the mountains leave a narrow coastal plain rarely exceeding twenty miles wide. The Black Sea peoples settled and farmed the valleys and narrow
alluvial fans of the area's rivers, developing a form of steep slope agriculture to grow vegetables and fruits. Tea, the major cash crop, did not
become popular until the 1960s. Some villagers combined gardening with transhumant pastoralism, which involves grazing small herds of sheep, goats,
and cattle on the lowlands in the winter and in the high Pontic pastures in the summer.