NAMES OF 12,211 VILLAGES WERE CHANGED IN TURKEY
Tolga Korkut, tolgakorkut@bianet.org

BIA Magazine
114491-names-of-12-211-villages-were-changed-in-tu rkey
May 14 2009
Turkey

According to Ass. Prof. Tuncel, 35 percent of villages in Turkey have
had their names changed since 1940.

Ass. Prof. Harun Tuncel, head of the Human and Economic Geography
department at Fırat University, Elazıg, has carried out a study of
changes in toponymy in Turkey.

He has found that the names of around 35 percent of villages, that
is 12,211 villages, have been changed over the years.

A count of all types of settlements revealed that around 28,000 names
were changed.

In an article published in the university’s social science journal
in 2000, Tuncel had said that locals had not completely accepted the
new names. Especially middle-aged and older people still used the
old names.

Some names may be reinstalled

Radikal journalist Ä°smet Berkan has recently quoted Prime Minister
Erdogan as saying that a "symbolic" step regarding the Kurdish question
could be to give Kurdish place names. Minister of the Interior BeÅ~_ir
Atalay also said recently, when asked, that "if there is local demand",
villages could be given Kurdish names.

Ahmet Turk, co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party
(DTP), commented, "You can change names, but if you ban the language,
then what sense does that make? No Kurd uses the new Turkish names
anyway. They use the same (old) names among themselves."

Turkification

According to Tuncel’s study, many villages in the Trabzon and Rize
provinces of the Black Sea had their names changed from Armenian,
Laz or Georgian into Turkish. In the East and Southeast of Turkey,
names were mostly changed from Armenian, Kurdish and Arabic.

Village names have been changed since the first decade of the 20th
century, but especially since the 1940s.

Most changes in Eastern Black Sea and Southeastern Turkey

Tuncel lists the number of villages whose names were changed per
province in Turkey:

Adana (169), Adıyaman (224), Afyonkarahisar (88), Agrı (374),
Amasya (99), Ankara (193), Antalya (168), Artvin (101), Aydın (69),
Balıkesir (110), Bilecik (32), Bingöl (247), Bitlis (236), Bolu
(182), Burdur (49), Bursa (136), Canakkale (53), Cankırı (76),
Corum (103), Denizli (53), Diyarbakır (555), Edirne (20), Elazıg
(383), Erzincan (366), Erzurum (653), EskiÅ~_ehir (70), Gaziantep
(279), Giresun (167), GumuÅ~_hane (343), Hakkâri (128), Hatay (117),
Isparta (46), Ä°cel (112), Ä°stanbul (21), Ä°zmir (68), Kars (398),
Kastamonu (295), Kayseri (86), Kırklareli (35), KırÅ~_ehir (39),
Kocaeli (26), Konya (236), Kutahya (93), Malatya (217), Manisa (83),
KahramanmaraÅ~_ (105), Mugla (70), MuÅ~_ (297), NevÅ~_ehir (24),
Nigde (48), Ordu (134), Rize (105), Sakarya (117), Samsun (185),
Siirt (392), Sinop (59), Sivas (406), Tekirdag (19), Tokat (245),
Trabzon (390), Tunceli (273), Å~^anlıurfa (389), UÅ~_ak (47), Van
(415), Yozgat (90), Zonguldak (156).