Turkey Straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, Turkey's strategic location has given it major influence in the region - and control over the entrance to the Black Sea. Once the centre of the Ottoman Empire, the modern republic was established in the 1920s by nationalist leader Kemal Ataturk. Most Turks live in the west of the country.
Many towns are on a major earthquake fault line.
Turkey captured the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999. Another long-running area of dispute has been Turkey's maritime boundary with Greece. It was behind the removal of the country's first Islamist government in 1997. Turkey has applied for European Union membership, but the EU says Ankara still needs to improve its political and human rights, and establish a properly working market economy. Sezer, previously the chief justice of the constitutional court, is regarded as a secularist, a fact which should make him acceptable to Turkey's powerful military.