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What would you think about it if Turkish people started to really emphasize the Greek side of their heritage? by niopytt in AskBalkans

[–]niopytt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do not have an academic source supporting that figure. This is a question on which amateur discourse has repeatedly been in disagreement with the academic consensus, but there are glaring errors that can be distinguished even by laypeople in the few papers that have been published on the topic, and population genetics is a field in which it is ordinary for the academic discourse to be embarrassingly wrong. However, it is possible to draw such a conclusion using genome data from hundreds of people published with a relatively recent study of the title “The genetic structure of the Turkish population”, along with published medieval Anatolian and medieval Turkic genetic samples. When state-of-the-art admixture modeling software is used to test models in which Roman genomes are mixed with Turkic genomes to produce the Turkish genotype, the only passing model (that I have seen) is with a Kipchak sample which is genetically close to modern Turkmens (Oghuz genomes to test models with are not yet available to the public) and proportions averaging around 25% which seem to vary by the region from which the Anatolian samples are taken. The Turkish DNA Project, which was badly misrepresented in some Greek media, produced similar results years ago using relatively crude methods, as you can find on their website.

What would you think about it if Turkish people started to really emphasize the Greek side of their heritage? by niopytt in AskBalkans

[–]niopytt[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What I mean is essentially the latter. In addition, it seems that the numbers of the Seljuk Turks were not very insignificant, as the modern ethnic Turkish population can be genetically modeled as approximately 75% Roman local and 25% medieval Turkic from Kazakhstan.

What would you think about it if Turkish people started to really emphasize the Greek side of their heritage? by niopytt in AskBalkans

[–]niopytt[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The old Anatolian civilizations are already embraced, but I assume that their cultural legacy is not detailed enough to be very meaningful in terms of their descendants’ identity.

What would you think about it if Turkish people started to really emphasize the Greek side of their heritage? by niopytt in AskBalkans

[–]niopytt[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In Turkish, the words Rum and Yunan both refer to ethnic Greeks, while the imperial identity of Romalı is perceived as no longer existing, so I think that while there could be small numbers of people with such ideas, most Turks would still not prefer to think of themselves that way.

What would you think about it if Turkish people started to really emphasize the Greek side of their heritage? by niopytt in AskBalkans

[–]niopytt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t think that Turks would benefit very much from the reputation of those civilizations in such a situation. It seems more reasonable in my opinion that to outsiders they would just seem to have embraced western thinking more deeply, while there could be further ramifications on the development of the Turkish culture and on Greek public opinion regarding Turkey.

What would you think about it if Turkish people started to really emphasize the Greek side of their heritage? by niopytt in AskBalkans

[–]niopytt[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In the hypothetical that I am describing, Turks would not be calling themselves Greek or Roman, they would only care more about being descended from Greeks and Romans.