Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
miles of arable land in the Harran plateau is being irrigated via gravity-flow water diverted
from this dam. The whole Euphrates River dam system, planned in the 1970s and built in
the 1980s and 1990s, which actually has the capacity to pump water as far as the water-
starved West Bank in Palestine, will make Turkey a greater power in the Arab Middle East
in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth. The heightened political profile that
Turkey has adopted of late should be seen in the context of this new geographical reality.
While recent headlines show Turkey turning its attention to the Middle East, this was
not always the case. From the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the thirteenth century,
the Ottomans were mainly focused on their northwest, toward Europe, where the wealth
and lucrative trade routes were. This was a pattern that had begun in the late Middle Ages,
when the ascent of Central Europe and of the Carolingian Empire acted like a magnet for
Turkish tribes, who themselves had gravitated westward across Anatolia to the Balkans,
to the most fertile agricultural lands in Asia Minor's immediate vicinity. Turkey may be
synonymous with the entire Anatolian land bridge, but (as with Russia) the nation's demo-
graphic and industrial heft has for centuries been clustered in the west, adjacent to the
Balkans, and relatively far from the Middle East. But though the Ottomans were clustered
near Europe, Anatolia's exceedingly high and rugged terrain, with each mountain valley
