In considering Turkey as the meeting place of three continents it is necessary that we should confine our conception of this fact to the strictly literal sense of the term. The country is a meeting place and nothing more. It has never been a transition zone physically and, as a consequence, there has been very little mingling of the different elements in its population. The very shape of the land prevents fusion of the inhabitants into a single people. The interior upland rises abruptly above a narrow fringe of coastal lowland. Its surface features, consisting partly of deserts and saline lakes, recall the typical aspect of central Asia. On the other hand, the rich vegetation of the maritime fringe reflects European characteristics. No better relic of Asia Minor’s former land connection with Europe exists than this strip of the west soldered to the eastern continent. But the physical union is clean-cut and, as a result, the change from the low-lying garniture of green scenery to the bare tracts of the uplands is sharp. These features make of Turkey a land of strange contrasts. Its coasts are washed by the waters of half a dozen seas and yet in places a journey of barely twenty-five miles from the shore lands the traveler squarely in the midst of a continental district. So diversified a country could not be the land of patriotism, and as we pick up the thread of its troubled history we find a woeful absence of this spirit. In Byzantine times as in Ottoman a selfish bias towards local interests, a parochial attachment of the sordid type, pervades its population. A medley of peoples, each filling its particular geographical frame and animated by widely divergent ideals, are constantly engaged in looking abroad rather than toward the land for the attainment of their hopes. Nature fostered this condition. Communications between the different regions have always been difficult. From the narrow fringe of coastland to the interior plateau the ascent is steep. More than that the maritime dweller of the lowland dreaded the total lack of comfort which he knew awaited him on the arid highland. Conversely the indolent inhabitant of this elevated district realized that were he to settle near the coast he could not compete successfully with the more active seafarers. As time went on the coastal peoples--mainly Greeks--accustomed themselves to look beyond the sea for intercourse with the outside world while the Turkish tenants of the interior land still kept in their mind’s eye the vast Asiatic background out of which they had emerged.