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Originally Posted by African  Technically, only a very small portion of Turkey is Europe proper, that is the area west of the Bosphorous, which includes Constandinople. Asia minor is techinically in Asia. European inhabitted it for thousands of years and were recently explelled in the 20th century by the Turks. Oddly enough, the western Turks, must have European blood in them, probably mostly Greek, as they look much more Euro than the central and eastern Turks, who are much darker and look more asian. As for playing in UEFA, good question. I think there is more than one right answer, and they would differ greatly. Maybe a few African countires can play in UEFA, it may just help the Africans achieve success that would take much longer than doing it alone in Africa. |
Basically modern day Turks belong to many different races. Most of the ones in the West are genetically Greeks as you mentioned and most of the ones in the East are genetically Arabs, Kurds, Anatolians etc. However their majority are Muslims, they have Turkish as their mother language and they consider their selves Turks.
The pure descedants of the Ottomans are not more than 10% of the Turkish population today. The early Turks had pale skin, not dark as many people falsely believe. The eastern Turks you mentioned are dark because of Kurdish and Arabic influence.