Turkey map

Courtesy of marwe from postcrossing

Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye), known officially as the Republic of Turkey, is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in Western Asia and Thrace in the Balkan region of southeastern Europe. Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Bulgaria to the northwest; Greece to the west; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, Azerbaijan (the exclave of Nakhchivan) and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the southeast. The Mediterranean Sea and Cyprus are to the south; the Aegean Sea to the west; and the Black Sea is to the north.

Separating Anatolia and Thrace are the Sea of Marmara and the Turkish Straits (the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles), which are commonly reckoned to delineate the boundary between Europe and Asia, thereby making Turkey a country of significant geostrategic importance.

Turkey Flag

The flag of Turkey (Turkish: Türk bayrağı) is a red flag with a white crescent moon and a star in its centre. The flag is called Ay Yıldız (literally, moon star) or Alsancak (red banner) in Turkish.

The flag has a complex origin since it is an ancient design, and uses the same symbols of the late flag of the Ottoman Empire which was adopted in 1844 with the Tanzimat reforms; though the shape, placement and shade of the color varies. The geometric proportions of the flag were legally standardized with the Turkish Flag Law in 1936.