With the advancement of modern genetic testing technology, the Turks, who claim to be the most "direct" inheritors of the Turkic people, have to face the embarrassing reality that their bloodline is not actually "Turkic".
Today's Turks, together with their "Turkic brothers", such as Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Kazakhs, etc., are not in the same genome at all; They turned out to be mainly descendants of the Greeks of the conquered Anatolia (Asia Minor), and compared with the contemporary Greeks, they can be said to be "homologous"!
Turkey and Greece are hostile enemies
In addition, modern Turks have mixed with some Armenian and Georgian ancestry from the Transcaucasus.
It seems that Turkey's feud is itself!
However, Turks are still "very Turkic" in terms of language, culture and beliefs.
Turkey's traditional costumes are very "Turkic"
After all, for the concept of "Turkic", in addition to blood, it is more of a definition of cultural and living customs.
Although the Turkish bloodline is a bit "deviated", it still does not affect them to continue to carry the banner of Turkism.
For example, the scene below is a scene from the 22nd SCO Leaders' Summit held in Uzbekistan in September 2022. As the only NATO leader in the venue, Erdogan was in the C position, and a group of old men surrounded him and listened earnestly - like a big brother teaching his younger brothers to "do things".
In addition to Putin, the scene is the leaders of the "Stan" countries and Azerbaijan
As a result, even Putin was taken over by the crowd.
In addition to Putin, the scene is mainly those of the "Stan" state and Azerbaijani President Aliyev
Don't... Is this the vast "Turkic dream"?
When Turkey did not attend the meeting, the "Stan countries" met with fellow Soviet compatriots, and their compatriots saw their compatriots, and their eyes were full of tears (in fact, more likely to be beaten and crying). Who would have guessed that Erdogan would come and go back and forth, and the Turks would see the Turks, and the atmosphere would be like a festival.
However, what is surprising is that according to many data analysis, Erdogan, the boss of the "Turkic gang", his ancestors, are actually Georgians, not "Turkic" at all.
Then, let's take a look at it from history.
Since the late Middle Ages, much of the Caucasus has gradually converted to Islam, with the exception of Armenia and Georgia, with two exceptions – Georgians adhere to the Orthodox faith, while Armenians are predominantly devout Catholics.
The ethno-religious and historical grievances of the Caucasus are complex
But if you look at the map again, you will find that both countries are surrounded by Muslim countries, and it is quite impossible to say that their population and culture are completely isolated from the Islamic world.
For example, the Aden Hazard Autonomous Republic in present-day Georgia (a Soviet-era name that corresponds to an ethnic autonomous region, not a sovereign state) is home to a large number of Georgians who believe in Islam.
Historically, Georgia has also been nearly "Islamized."
In the 14th century, the Timurid Empire founded by the Turkized Mongols conquered Georgia and began experimenting with spreading Islam here. The later Persian Empire also briefly conquered Georgia; Later, it became the frontier of the Ottoman Empire.... For about four or five hundred years, the actual control of Georgia was the Islamic state.
Especially during the Ottoman era, Turkish rulers pursued a variety of policies to try to assimilate Christians into their borders. For example, tax breaks were granted to locals who converted to Islam, priority appointments to civil servants, and so on.
As a result, among Georgians, there gradually emerged some Georgian Muslims who abandoned the Orthodox faith and converted to Islam.
During those years, Georgian Muslims were very "well eaten" in the Islamic world, and they could enter the Persian bureaucracy and become the king's staff; It also ran to Iraq to establish the Mamluk dynasty; Moreover, the Ottoman army was also very fond of recruiting Muslim soldiers from Georgia....
By the 18th century, when the Russian Empire entered the area, some Georgian principalities began to embrace Islam. In the private sector, there are also about 1/3 of the Muslim population, and most of them gather in Batumi, Georgia's second largest city.
It can be said that when the Russians came, the Islamization of Georgia had reached a certain level, and the Islamists in Georgia were still a bit large.
Soon, they were the target of repression and expulsion by the Russian Empire.
In the more than one hundred years from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century, in order to restore Georgia to a "pure" Orthodox region, the Russian Empire spent a lot of effort to "de-Islamize" here, and the effect was quite obvious.
Traditional Georgian costumes
According to later sources, between 1800 and 1900 alone, more than 600,000 Georgians traveled south to Turkey, almost all of them Georgian Muslims who were reluctant to convert their faith.
To date, Georgia has a population of only 3.7 million, while there are 1.6 million Turks of Georgian descent (the total population of Turkey is 85 million).
But in the ethnic division of modern Turkey, these 1.6 million people are directly counted as Turks.
In a similar way, 80% of Turks are classified as Turks, leaving 15% of Kurds, as well as Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Jews and other very low minorities.
In this way, the Turks become the proper majority people.
At every turn, I want to cosplay the old ancestors
Okay, let's go back to "Turkic Big Brother" Erdogan.
Erdogan was born in the Rieza region on the Black Sea coast, a northern province near Georgia, and at the age of 13 his family moved to Kasparsa, Istanbul. Erdogan grew up with a hard life and was a grassroots politician who worked hard from the bottom.
In Erdogan's old home, a large number of Georgian Muslims fled to Turkey, and they were later called Raz by the Ottoman Empire, which means Turkic brothers.
President Erdogan also happened to be a pure-blooded Raz.
According to foreign media reports, at the end of the 19th century, Erdogan's great-grandfather moved with his family from the Batumi region of Georgia in the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire's Rize, where he settled.
Before the Kemal Revolution, the Raz lived a relatively closed life, mostly intermarrying within the ethnic group, and speaking a Raz language that belonged to the South Caucasian language family and was close to Georgian.
The Raz people at the end of the 19th century
By the 1930s, the Raz were directly "identified" by Mustafa Kemal as Turks, and the Raz language was restricted and coerced to be Latinized.
In this way, gradually, these Raz people's understanding of their Georgian homeland became more and more blurred, and their identification with the Turkish ethnic group became higher and higher.
In the national narrative of modern Turkey, the Turks are defined as the most "pure" direct successors of the Turks.
In this way, President Erdogan, whose ancestors were all Raz, naturally became Turkic.
Even this "leading big brother" of the "Turkic nation" is actually a Georgian in terms of blood.
To this day, there are still Muslims in Georgia, and they mainly gather in the Batumi region.
In earlier Soviet times, they were classified as the Autonomous Republic of Hazard within the Soviet Union Republic of Georgia.
At the same time, according to the ethnic division law of the Soviet Union, these Georgian Muslims were classified as Hazards, even if they were almost indistinguishable from Orthodox Georgians by blood.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Greater Georgianism became prevalent, and Orthodoxy was fanatically promoted by Georgian democrats, so much so that for a time the Muslim population of Batumi was under great pressure – whoever did not convert to Orthodoxy was the enemy of Georgia.
Originally, in the early 1990s, when Georgia first became independent, Batumi's Muslim population accounted for about 75 percent, but by 2004, according to Georgia's census, the number of Muslim residents in the region had dropped to 50 percent.
At one point, the Autonomous Republic of Azhar also sought independence from Georgia, but in the end it did not form de facto independence as Abkhazia and South Ossetia did.
The traditional costumes of the Azhar are highly similar to those of the Georgian ethnic group
In fact, the three elements of nation, country, and faith, to a large extent, cannot be directly equated.
Very early on, some German sociologists pointed out that the nation belongs to a fictional community, not a biological concept, but a political and cultural concept, or can be understood as a thing that serves "political culture", and binds it to some interests, and is constantly differentiated, integrated and even directly created by political forces....
It is very typical that modern Turks and Greeks do not differ much in blood and genes; The most important difference between the two that are hostile to each other basically exists in the fields of religion and history and culture.
Even Mustafa Kemal had Greek descent (some said to be Greek Jewish descent), but this did not prevent him from constructing the "Turkic nation-state consciousness" of modern Turkey and becoming the father of the modern Turkish state that posterity admired.
That is why, then, President Erdogan, of Georgian descent, now wants to be the "leading big brother" of the Turkic people, and it seems that there is nothing to be surprised about.