Titillating Turkey Trivia
Brox International Press – Features & Discoveries of the World
11-24-2004
The American turkey was accidentally named after the country. After
the Spanish first found the bird in America more than 400 years ago
and brought it back to Europe, the English mistakenly thought it was
an African bird they had named for the country it was shipped through;
Turkey. The name stuck even after they realized the birds weren’t
the same.
The highest point in Turkey is Mount Ararat which is 5,166 meters
tall. The remains of Noah’s Ark are thought to be buried on this
mountain.
Turkey produces 65% of the world’s hazelnuts.
The national drink of Turkey is called ‘çay’ and is a type of tea
drunk black without milk.
Popular sports in Turkey include oil wrestling and camel
wrestling. Camel wrestling consists of two camels pushing against
each other until one is knocked over or runs away. Weightlifting and
wrestling are the sports that Turkey usually wins at the Olympics.
Turkish Bath Houses have operated for hundreds of years. They are a
cross between swimming pools, health clubs and communal baths, and
often have very plain exteriors with beautiful, ornately designed
interiors.
Nearly 99% of people are Muslims, and any Turkish city skyline will
include the many brightly colored domes of many mosques, which can
have diameters up to 30 m.
Turkey still has many unresolved issue with neighboring Christian
Armenia, including well-documented massacres and deportations that
Armenians refer to as the First Genocide of the 20th century.
Ingenious population of Kurdish minority is not recognize by Turkey
as a distinct nation group, even though they comprise about 30 percent
of the south-eastern provincial population.
The ancient city of Troy was made famous in Homer’s The Odyssey
and The Iliad, written between 1500 and 1200 B.C. Though initially
believed to be mere legend, a German explorer discovered what some
think to be the ruins of Troy on the west coast of Turkey in 1871.
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