Place name changes in Turkey
Place name changes in Turkey have been undertaken, periodically, in bulk from 1913 to the present by successive Turkish governments.
Names changed were usually of Armenian, Greek, Georgian, Laz, Bulgarian, Kurdish (Zazaki), Persian, Syriac, or Arabic origin.
Place names that changed formally have frequently persisted in local dialects and languages throughout the ethnically diverse country.
Most name changes occurred in the eastern regions of the country where minority ethnicities form a large part or a majority of the population.
[1] At the height of World War I and during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, when the ethnic cleansing policies of non-Muslim Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian minorities were underway, Minister of War Enver Pasha issued an edict (ferman) on 6 October 1916, declaring:[2][3][4][5][6] It has been decided that provinces, districts, towns, villages, mountains, and rivers, which are named in languages belonging to non-Muslim nations such as Armenian, Greek or Bulgarian, will be renamed into Turkish.
that:[8] If we want to be the owner of our country, then we should turn even the name of the smallest village into Turkish and not leave its Armenian, Greek or Arabic variants.
To do away with "separatist notions", the Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Kurdish, Georgian, Tatar, Circassian, and Laz village names were also changed.
"[20] The Special Commission for Name Change (Ad Değiştirme İhtisas Kurulu) was created in 1952 under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior.
[21][22][23][24][25] This figure also included names of streets, monuments, quarters, neighborhoods, and other components that make up certain municipalities.
[29] Also that year, when talking about his family origins, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used the native Greek name of Potamya instead of Güneysu.
Through independent study, etymologist Sevan Nişanyan estimates that, of the geographical location name changes, 4,200 were Greek, 4,000 Kurdish, 3,600 Armenian, 750 Arabic, 400 Assyrian, 300 Georgian, 200 Laz, and 50 others.
[4][12][13][14][15] The official statistics of The Special Commission for Name Change (Ad Degistirme Ihtisas Komisyonu) claim that the total number of villages, towns, cities, and settlements renamed is 12,211.
[4] Most neo-Aramaic name changes occurred in the southeast of Turkey near the Syrian border in the Tur Abdin region.
[4] The historical region of Tao-Klarjeti, which includes the modern provinces of Artvin, Rize, Ardahan and the northern part of Erzurum, has long been the center of Georgian culture and religion.
Lazistan and Tao-Klarjeti, then part of the Georgian Principality of Samtskhe, was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the 16th century.
Due to linguistic differences, the new Ottoman administration in his records on Gurjistan Vilayet [tr] (Province of Georgia) adapted Georgian geographical names in Ottoman-Turkish style.
[4] The Kurdish (and Zaza) geographical name changes were exempt under the Ottoman Empire due to the Islamic religious orientation of Kurds.
[7] During the Turkish Republican era, the word Kurdistan was banned, with some governments not acknowledging Kurds as an ethnic group.
