Background of Christian Literature in Modern Turkish
Modern Turkish, with its Latin alphabet, was introduced to Turkey in the 1930s to replace Ottoman Turkish with its Arabic alphabet. Today, there are approximately 84 million Modern Turkish speakers worldwide. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a great population exchange of about 2 million people between Greece and Turkey. Approximately 1.2 million Christians left Asia Minor, East Thrace, the Pontic Alps, and the Caucasus to move to Greece. This reduced the percentage of the Christian population in Turkey to next to nothing. Today, the regenerated Christian population is under 7,000 in all of Turkey. The Turkish Bible Society published its first Modern Turkish Bible in 2001, and there are only two Christian bookshops in Istanbul (the largest city in Turkey) besides the Turkish Bible Society. Christian publication works in Turkey are primarily funded by missionary groups and limited by the size of the Christian community.
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