Armenians in Turkey in the context of "Eastern Anatolia region"

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⭐ Core Definition: Armenians in Turkey

Armenians in Turkey (Turkish: Türkiye Ermenileri; Armenian: Թուրքահայեր or Թրքահայեր, T’urk’ahayer lit.'Turkish Armenians'), one of the indigenous peoples of Turkey, have an estimated population of 40,000 to 50,000 today, down from a population of almost 2 million Armenians between the years 1914 and 1921. Today, the overwhelming majority of Turkish Armenians are concentrated in Istanbul. They support their own newspapers, churches and schools, and the majority belong to the Armenian Apostolic faith and a minority of Armenians in Turkey belong to the Armenian Catholic Church or to the Armenian Evangelical Church. They are not considered part of the Armenian diaspora, since they have been living in their historical homeland for more than four thousand years.

Until the Armenian genocide of 1915, most of the Armenian population of Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) lived in the eastern parts of the country that Armenians call Western Armenia (roughly corresponding to the modern Eastern Anatolia region).

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Armenians in Turkey in the context of Greeks in Turkey

The Greeks in Turkey constitute a small population of Greek and Greek-speaking Eastern Orthodox Christians who mostly live in Istanbul, as well as on the two islands of the western entrance to the Dardanelles: Imbros and Tenedos (Turkish: Gökçeada and Bozcaada). Greeks are one of the four ethnic minorities officially recognized in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, together with Jews, Armenians, and Bulgarians.

They are the remnants of the estimated 200,000 Greeks who were permitted under the provisions of the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations to remain in Turkey following the 1923 population exchange, which involved the forcible resettlement of approximately 1.2 million Greeks from Anatolia and East Thrace and of half a million Turks from all of Greece except for Western Thrace. After years of persecution (e.g. the Varlık Vergisi, the Istanbul Pogrom and the 1964 expulsion of Istanbul Greeks), emigration of ethnic Greeks from the Istanbul region greatly accelerated, reducing the Greek minority population from 119,822 before the 1955 pogrom to about 7,000 by 1978. The 2008 figures released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry places the current number of Turkish citizens of Greek descent at the 3,000–4,000 mark.However, according to the Human Rights Watch the Greek population in Turkey is estimated at 2,500 in 2006. The Greek population in Turkey is collapsing as the community is now far too small to sustain itself demographically, due to emigration, much higher death rates than birth rates and continuing discrimination.

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Armenians in Turkey in the context of Demographics of Turkey

Demographic features of the population of Turkey include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population. As of 1 July 2025, the population of Turkey was over 85.8 million with an annual growth rate of 0.36%. This official population number excludes the registered Syrian refugees under temporary protection status which have a population of about 2.6 million as of the date.

Turks are the largest ethnic group, comprising 70–75% of the population while Kurds are the second largest with 19%. The others, including Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Bosniaks, Circassians, Chechens, Georgians, Greeks, Pomaks, Rum, Russians, Romani, Jews, Laz people and others make 6–11% of the population according to a 2016 estimate by the CIA.

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Armenians in Turkey in the context of Armenian Americans

Armenian Americans (Armenian: ամերիկահայեր, romanizedamerikahayer) are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the United States following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, the Adana massacre of 1909, and the Armenian genocide of 1915–1918 in the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1950s many Armenians from the Middle East (especially from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey) migrated to the United States as a result of political instability in the region. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons. The Los Angeles area has the largest Armenian population in the United States.

The 2020 United States census reported that 519,001 Americans held full or partial Armenian roots either alone or combined with another ancestral origin. Various organizations and media criticize these numbers as an underestimate, proposing 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenian Americans instead. The highest concentration of Americans of Armenian descent is in the Greater Los Angeles area, where 166,498 people have identified themselves as Armenian to the 2000 census, comprising over 40% of the 385,488 people who identified Armenian origins in the United States at the time. The city of Glendale, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, is widely thought to be the center of Armenian American life (although many Armenians live in the aptly named "Little Armenia" neighborhood of Los Angeles).

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Armenians in Turkey in the context of Vakıflı, Samandağ

Vakıflı (Armenian: Վաքըֆ, romanizedVak'ëf, pronounced [ˈvakʰəf], official name: Vakıfköy) is a neighbourhood of the municipality and district of Samandağ, Hatay Province, Turkey. Its population is 103 (2022). It is the only remaining Armenian village in Turkey. Located on the slopes of Musa Dagh in the Samandağ district of Hatay Province, the village overlooks the Mediterranean Sea and is within eyesight of the Syrian border. It is home to a community of about 130 Turkish-Armenians. The local Western Armenian dialect is highly divergent and cannot be fully understood by other Western Armenians.

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