The ancients called it Asia Minor – the land mass protruding from the depths of Asia into the eastern Mediterranean, defined by the Black Sea to the North, the Aegean to the West and to the fairy-tale lands of Mesopotamia in the South.

Anatolia was also the nucleus of the Byzantine Empire which lasted 1000 years, with its capital in Constantinople, and it was here, too, that early Christianity first took root, only to be replaced with the advent of Islam, first under the Arabs, and then under the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, who pushed the frontiers of their empire from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic and from the Indian Ocean to Vienna.

Slowly but surely, however, territorial gains were whittled away, until nothing remained but the spirits of the Turks under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to re-establish modern Turkey in the ancient landscape of Anatolia.

Modern-day Turkey is a marriage of the character of ancient Anatolian civilizations and the progressive secular democracy and reforms launched by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of the Turks. The country is a fusion of vibrant Mediterranean cultures and the enchantment of the East, a combination of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the international cities and the beautiful simplicity of village life.

Given the New World order, the geopolitical position of Turkey makes it as important a cultural crossroads today as it was in Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman times. Its vital position as a link between East and West gives the country great symbolic power.