@vriska Turks are white cause Greeks are white, no?

@georgia posts that will start wars

@vriska And each of them will somehow have a different answer :D

@vriska Turks are white Italians are not.

@georgia

I thought you might be serious for a moment thinking Turks and Greeks are related but I guess you just trollan'

@taylan not joking many Turks are genetically Greek because Turkish land used to be Greek and invading Turkic armies Turkified the land but didn't make a huge genetic dent. Like the deal with Berbers being Arabized.

@georgia @taylan How anybody can deny that modern Turks are very heavily Greek genetically I do not understand

@taylan @georgia Technically they kinda are,

Most Anatolian Turks are genetically and culturally more similar to their Greek, Kurdish, Armenian and Assyrian neighbors, than Turks of Central Asia. In fact, modern Turkic nationalism is largely a modern phenomenon, and the lines between ethnic groups in Ottoman times was really blurry.

There used to be an old saying that Turkish culture is held together by Persian and Greek pillars

@darlingofinana @taylan >Assyrian
don't you mean Aramean? (kidding) (mostly) (not really)

@vriska@lizards.live I love how many people came out of the woodworks to debate this. Now we just need some anthropologists

@georgia @vriska The Turks originally came from the present-day Kachastan region, so they are Asians.

@georgia @taylan I mean both, really, since the line between Assyrian and Aramean was blurred by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and practically gone by the Seleucid Empire.

Yes, Assyrian continuity is real, Assyrian Nationalists just get a little too zealous with it like claiming Assyrian Neo-Aramaic is identical to Classical Syriac and Akkadian (in reality, Assyrian Aramaic dialects come from a multitude of Aramaic dialects, all with different histories)

@darlingofinana @taylan ah very good points

@darlingofinana @georgia

> Most Anatolian Turks are genetically and culturally more similar to their Greek, Kurdish, Armenian and Assyrian neighbors, than Turks of Central Asia

Add in Persian, Balkan, Georgian, etc. etc. and yes that's most likely true. (Hehe Georgia hehe.)

But to single out any one of those ethnicities and say "Turks are genetically more like X" doesn't make sense, because for any such ethnicity you choose, it's going to be just the Turks in one specific region of Anatolia who are close to them.

For example, me personally, I definitely have some Greek ancestry, since my Turkish dad is from Aydin (Aegean region but slightly inwards from the coast). I think my great-grandmother or her mother or something was married to a Greek guy or had a relationship with a Greek soldier or something, but I forgot the details.

I've also had many classmates in Izmir (coastal Aegean region, directly across the Aegean Sea from Greece) who had very curly hair (like Greek statues) and other very obviously Greek ethnic features, much more so than my dad. I had a classmate with blond curly hair, ever so slightly plump, who I always thought looked like Aphroditus. 😊 (I didn't have a crush on her or anything, it was just a unique appearance among Turkish girls.)

However, the Aegean region is just one of seven major regions of Anatolia, and you won't find many Turks mixed with Greek in other parts. (Probably some in southwest Marmara, to the north of the Aegean region, since that's still very close.)

@vriska Real answer: Race is fake, and Western racial terms like "white" and "black" were invented in order to classify who could be enslaved and who was free, not an anthropological means to describe the complex cultural mixture of Anatolian Turks

@vriska Any Anthropologist worth their weight would have this answer btw. Any anthropologist that tried to validate Western Racialism, well, we have a term for them: Scientific Racists