In 1800, the region of present-day Turkey had a population of approximately 9.8 million. Turkey’s population would grow steadily throughout the 1800s, growing to 14 million by the turn of the century. During this time, Turkey was the center of the Ottoman Empire, which also covered much of the Balkans, Arabia, and the African coast from Libya to Somalia. In the early 20th century, the Ottoman Empire's dissolution period began, characterized by political instability and a series of military defeats and coups. The empire was one of the defeated Central Powers of the First World War, in which it suffered approximately three million total fatalities. It is estimated that the majority of these deaths did not come directly from the war, but as a result of the government-orchestrated mass expulsion and genocide of non-Turks from within the Turkish borders, specifically Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks and Kurds; many ethnic Turks were simultaneously expelled from neighboring countries, namely Greece, which makes these events less-visible when examining annual data, although Turkey's total population did drop by one million between 1914 and 1924.

The Republic of Turkey Following the end of the Turkish War of Independence in 1923, and the establishment of the republic of Turkey, the population would begin to recover, tripling from just around 21 million in 1950 to over 63 million by the turn of the century. The new republic, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, introduced sweeping, progressive reforms that modernized the country, particularly its healthcare and education systems. Turkey remained neutral throughout the Second World War, and became a member of NATO during the Cold War. The second half of the 1900s was marked with intermittent periods of political instability, and a number of military conflicts (namely, in Cyprus and Kurdistan). In spite of this, Turkey has generally been considered a developed country for most of this time, although its life expectancy and infant mortality rates have often been more in line with developing nations.

Modern Turkey In the past decade, Turkey's population growth has continued its rapid growth; while birth rates have declined, the mass migration of refugees to the country fleeing the Syrian Civil War has seen the population growth ramain high. This influx of refugees was seen as a stepping stone in Turkey's accession to the European Union, with whom it has been negotiating a potential membership since 2005. Accession to the EU would provide huge economic benefits to Turkey, however, political developments in recent years (particularly the 2016 coup) have seen these negotiations stall, as the EU has accused the Turkish government of committing widespread human rights violations, such as torture, political imprisonment and censorship of free speech. In 2020, Turkey's population is estimated to be over 84 million people, and is expected to exceed 100 million in the next two decades.

Ottoman Plovdiv Geodataset is a digital addition to the monograph Ottoman Plovdiv: Space, Architecture, and Population (14th–17th centuries) by Grigor Boykov, published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, ISBN. Analyses and conclusions presented in the book are based on this dataset.

The geodataset is created and curated by Dr. Grigor Boykov, Institute for East European History, University of Vienna. For contacts: grigor.boykov@univie.ac.at

Sources:

A variety of primary sources contributed to the creation of the dataset. Except for 30-Meter SRTM DEM, several historical plans of the city were harvested for features: Plan of Plovdiv and its surroundings by A. Jägerschmid, 1828 (National Library "Ivan Vazov," Plovdiv. Kp II 60); City plan of Plovdiv by Lejean, 1867. (Guillaume Lejean, "Voyage en Bulgarie," Le Tour du monde, nouveau journal des voyages 26 (1873): 113–70); City plan of Plovdiv by Heinrich Kiepert, 1876. (Crop from Heinrich Kiepert, Karte des Sandjak Filibe (Philippopolis) aufgenommen nach Anordnung des dortigen Provinzial-Gouverneurs Mehemmed-Nusret-Pascha.); City plan of Plovdiv by Ferdinand v. Hochstetter, 1869. (Ferdinand von Hochstetter, "Reise durch Rumelien im Sommer 1869. 5. Philippopel," Mitteilungen der K. und K. Geographischen Gesellschaft in Wien 14 (1871): 65–80); City plan of Plovdiv by G. Ilinskij, 1878. (National Library "Ivan Vazov," Plovdiv. РЦ ІV 62); City plan of Plovdiv by Joseph Schnitter, 1891. Various Ottoman archival and narrative sources also contributed to creating the dataset. For detailed information about the source base of the dataset, please refer to the relevant section in Boykov's monograph.

The geodataset consists of 33 layers. A brief information on each of the layers is provided below. For further information, please refer to the book.

Layers:

1. Street polylines – created by manual feature extraction from Schmitter's 1891 plan in scale 1:5000.
2. Street polygons – created by manual feature extraction from Schmitter's 1891 plan and partial data from Ilinskij's 1878 plan in scale 1:4200.
3. Mahalle – defines urban quarters' boundaries, based on variety of sources (see the book).
4. Density_1472 – presents the distribution of population densities per quarter in 1472, based on data from Ottoman tax register PD 17/27, Bulgarian National Library, Sofia.
5. Density_1489 – distribution of population densities per quarter in 1489, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 26, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
6. Density_1516 – distribution of population densities per quarter in 1516, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 77, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
7. Density_1525 – distribution of population densities per quarter in 1525, based on data from Ottoman tax register MAD 519, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
8. Density_1530 – distribution of population densities per quarter in 1530, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 370, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
9. Density_1570 – distribution of population densities per quarter in 1570, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 494, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
10. Density_1596 – distribution of population densities per quarter in 1596, based on data from Ottoman tax register KuK 65, Cadaster Archive, Ankara and TD 648 and TD 1001, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
11. Density_1614 – distribution of population densities per quarter in 1614, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 729, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
12. TotalPop_1472 – presents the distribution of total population per quarter in 1472, based on data from Ottoman tax register PD 17/27, Bulgarian National Library, Sofia.
13. TotalPop_1489 – distribution of total population per quarter in 1489, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 26, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
14. TotalPop_1516 – distribution of total population per quarter in 1516, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 77, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
15. TotalPop_1525 – distribution of total population per quarter in 1525, based on data from Ottoman tax register MAD 519, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
16. TotalPop_1530 – distribution of total population per quarter in 1530, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 370, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
17. TotalPop_1570 – distribution of total population per quarter in 1570, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 494, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
18. TotalPop_1596 – distribution of total population per quarter in 1596, based on data from Ottoman tax register KuK 65, Cadaster Archive, Ankara and TD 648 and TD 1001, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
19. TotalPop_1614 – distribution of total population per quarter in 1614, based on data from Ottoman tax register TD 729, Ottoman Archives, Istanbul (BOA).
20. Buildings_certain_location – polygons reflecting the location and shapes of certainly identifiable buildings from the Ottoman period.
21. Buildings_tentative_location – polygons of buildings from the Ottoman period, whose existence is attested by the written sources, but precise location and shape are uncertain.
22. Cemetery_Christian – the area of Christian graveyards, based on the plans of Schnitter and Ilinskij.
23. Cemetery_Muslim – the area of Muslim graveyards, based on the plans of Schnitter and Ilinskij.
24. Field – cultivated plots as reflected in the plans of Schnitter and Ilinskij.
25. Orchard – orchards as reflected in the plans of Schnitter and Ilinskij.
26. Forest – forests as reflected in the plans of Schnitter and Ilinskij.
27. Fountain – public fountains (çeşme) as reflected in the plan of Ilinskij.
28. Walls – reconstruction of the medieval walls of Plovdiv, based on observations and archaeological data
29. Swap – the tentative shape of the swamp at the southeastern edge of the city.
30. Islands – islands on the Maritsa, based on the plan of Schnitter
31. Bridge – reconstruction of Lala Şahin's wooden bridge, based on the plan of Schnitter, visual sources, and archaeological data.
32. Maritsa – the riverbed of the Maritsa before regulations, based on the plan of Schnitter.
33. Contour – contour lines of the relief, extracted from 30-meter DEM.

History of East-Central Europe has been intertwined with the history of Turks in the past. A significant part of this region of Europe has been fallen under Ottoman control during the 150 years of Ottoman occupation in the 16–17th centuries. The presence of the Ottoman Empire affected this area not only culturally but also demographically. The Romani people, the largest ethnic minority of the East-Central European area, share an even more eventful past with Turkish people from the time of their migration throughout Eurasia and they were a notable ethnic group in East-Central Europe in the Ottoman era already. The relationship of Turks with East-Central European ethnic groups and with regional Roma ethnicity was investigated based on genome-wide autosomal single nucleotide polymorphism data. Population structure analysis, ancestry estimation, various formal tests of admixture and DNA segment analyses were carried out in order to shed light to the conclusion of these events on a genome-wide basis. Analyses show that the Ottoman occupation of Europe left detectable impact in the affected East-Central European area and shaped the ancestry of the Romani people as well. We estimate that the investigated European populations have an average identity-by-descent share of 0.61 with Turks, which is notable, compared to other European populations living in West and North Europe far from the affected area, and compared to the share of Sardinians, living isolated from these events. Admixture of Roma and Turks during the Ottoman rule show also high extent.

Prior to 1829, the area of modern day Greece was largely under the control of the Ottoman Empire. In 1821, the Greeks declared their independence from the Ottomans, and achieved it within 8 years through the Greek War of Independence. The Independent Kingdom of Greece was established in 1829 and made up the southern half of present-day, mainland Greece, along with some Mediterranean islands. Over the next century, Greece's borders would expand and readjust drastically, through a number of conflicts and diplomatic agreements; therefore the population of Greece within those political borders** was much lower than the population in what would be today's borders. As there were large communities of ethnic Greeks living in neighboring countries during this time, particularly in Turkey, and the data presented here does not show the full extent of the First World War, Spanish Flu Pandemic and Greko-Turkish War on these Greek populations. While it is difficult to separate the fatalities from each of these events, it is estimated that between 500,000 and 900,000 ethnic Greeks died at the hands of the Ottomans between the years 1914 and 1923, and approximately 150,000 died due to the 1918 flu pandemic. These years also saw the exchange of up to one million Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece, and several hundred thousand Muslims from Greece to Turkey; this exchange is one reason why Greece's total population did not change drastically, despite the genocide, displacement and demographic upheaval of the 1910s and 1920s. Greece in WWII A new Hellenic Republic was established in 1924, which saw a decade of peace and modernization in Greece, however this was short lived. The Greek monarchy was reintroduced in 1935, and the prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, headed a totalitarian government that remained in place until the Second World War. Metaxas tried to maintain Greek neutrality as the war began, however Italy's invasion of the Balkans made this impossible, and the Italian army tried invading Greece via Albania in 1940. The outnumbered and lesser-equipped Greek forces were able to hold off the Italian invasion and then push them backwards into Albania, marking the first Allied victory in the war. Following a series of Italian failures, Greece was eventually overrun when Hitler launched a German and Bulgarian invasion in April 1941, taking Athens within three weeks. Germany's involvement in Greece meant that Hitler's planned invasion of the Soviet Union was delayed, and Hitler cited this as the reason for it's failure (although most historians disagree with this). Over the course of the war approximately eight to eleven percent of the Greek population died due to fighting, extermination, starvation and disease; including over eighty percent of Greece's Jewish population in the Holocaust. Following the liberation of Greece in 1944, the country was then plunged into a civil war (the first major conflict of the Cold War), which lasted until 1949, and saw the British and American-supported government fight with Greek communists for control of the country. The government eventually defeated the Soviet-supported communist forces, and established American influence in the Aegean and Balkans throughout the Cold War. Post-war Greece From the 1950s until the 1970s, the Marshall Plan, industrialization and an emerging Tourism sector helped the Greek economy to boom, with one of the strongest growth rates in the world. Apart from the military coup, which ruled from 1967 to 1974, Greece remained relatively peaceful, prosperous and stable throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The population reached 11.2 million in the early 2000s, before going into decline for the past fifteen years. This decline came about due to a negative net migration rate and slowing birth rate, ultimately facilitated by the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008; many Greeks left the country in search of work elsewhere, and the economic troubles have impacted the financial incentives that were previously available for families with many children. While the financial crisis was a global event, Greece was arguably the hardest-hit nation during the crisis, and suffered the longest recession of any advanced economy. The financial crisis has had a consequential impact on the Greek population, which has dropped by 800,000 in 15 years, and the average age has increased significantly, as thousands of young people migrate in search of employment.

This gazetteer is a joint product of two research projects, UrbanOccupationsOETR (European Research Council - Starting Grant, Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850-2000, https://urbanoccupations.ku.edu.tr, Grant agreement ID: 679097) and POPGEO_BG (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, Population Geography of Bulgaria, 1500- 1920: A Historical Spatial Analysis, https://popgeo.ku.edu.tr, Grant agreement ID: 867474) both funded by the European Commission.

M. Erdem Kabadayı and Grigor Boykov have been the principal investigators of UrbanOccupationsOETR and POPGEO_BG, respectively.

This unprecedented large-scale Ottoman gazetteer is based on mid-nineteenth century population registers (NFS.d. with their archival fond) available at the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye, Directorate of State Archives. Its current first version enlists 16.296 populated places (12.285 and 4.011 geolocated within UrbanOccupationsOETR and POPGEO_BG, respectively) extracted from 764 population registers dating between 1830 and 1849. For details of the geolocation procedure, especially for UrbanOccupationsOETR but also valid to a large extent POPGEO_BG, see:

Ma, Jilian, Akın Sefer, and M. Erdem Kabadayı. “Geolocating Ottoman Settlements: The Use of Historical Maps for Digital Humanities.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium of the International Cartography Commission on the History of Cartography “Mapping the Ottoman Realm: Travelers, Cartographers and Archaeologists” 21–23 April 2020, Istanbul, Turkey (Rescheduled for December 2021, Florence, Italy), edited by Imre Josef Demhardt, Vol. 3. Göttingen: Copernicus Publications, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5194/ica-proc-3-10-2021.

The gazetteer is available in the format of a spreadsheet with 15 columns. It provides the following information for all of the 16.296 enlisted populated places:

• longitude
• latitude
• register_date_in_Hicri (calendar)
• doc_type (mufassal or icmal population registers)
• NFS.d. register_number (as in the archival fond)
• project (acronym)
• toponym_modern (current toponym in various languages depending on the location of the populated place today). For 797 populated places, toponym_modern is entered as ‘vanished.’ These populated places are all geolocated with coordinates by using georeferenced historical maps. However, no current settlements could be identified in their locations.
• toponym Ottoman in NFS.d. (typed as accurately as possible in Arabic script copying from the Ottoman population registers)
• toponym transcribed (original handwritten Ottoman to Latin script, as a principle, following the Redhouse lexicon) from NFS.d.
• kaza (the Ottoman administrative unit on the sub-district level as stated) in NFS.d.
• kaza_1848_1264 and liva_1848_1264 correspondences of enlisted kaza information in NFS.d. registers according to the official Ottoman yearbook dating to 1848 (1264 in Hicri):
  • Salname-i Devlet-i Aliye-i Osmaniye. 2nd edition. Istanbul: Darü’t-Tıbaatü’l-Amire, 1264.
• (Unique) populated place id (number)

As well as two additional administrative levels, divan and nahiye for the limited number of populated places.

POPGEO_BG was an individual fellowship; therefore, Grigor Boykov has contributed to the construction of this section of the gazetteer single-handedly, from its conceptualization to the data entry and control.

UrbanOccupationsOETR, on the other hand, sustained a large research team between 01.10.2016 and 30.09.2022 at Koç University and several team members contributed to the gazetteer in varying capacities:

M. Erdem Kabadayı conceptualized and designed the research with support from Grigor Boykov. M. Erdem Kabadayı, Akın Sefer, Grigor Boykov, and Piet Gerrits supervised the project. Piet Gerrits designed and maintained graphical user interfaces for geolocation and data entry. Akın Sefer as a team leader, located, evaluated, and selected the population registers, supervised and controlled geolocation and data entry, and conducted data curation, coding, control, and cleaning. Efe Erünal, Aysel Yıldız, and Semih Çelik also conducted source selection. Efe Erünal was also active in geolocation and data entry control.

Following UrbanOccupationsOETR team members in alphabetical order geolocated populated places and entered data into our geospatial databases: Akın Sefer, Aysel Yıldız, Barış Yıldırım, Deniz Ali Uyan, Efe Erünal, Fulya Özturan, Jilian Ma, Mertkan Karaca, Nikola Rakovski, Semih Çelik, Şehnaz İyibaş.

External researchers Furkan Elmas and Alper Kara conducted Ottoman transcription corrections and new entries under the supervision of Akın Sefer.

Piet Gerrits maintained the digital research infrastructure of the UrbanOccupationsOETR and merged the POPGEO_BG dataset to construct the gazetteer. Furthermore, he also prepared the GeoPackage and data visualization interface available at: https://urbanoccupations.ku.edu.tr/gazetteer/.

This gazetteer is a work in progress, and we would appreciate critical feedback to improve it in its following versions. Please get in touch with mkabadayi@ku.edu.tr / mekabadayi@gmail.com / grigor.boykov@univie.ac.at / griboykov@yahoo.com for your correction suggestions and inquiries.

If you would like to use the gazetteer in further publication, please use the credentials specified below:

This statistic shows the total population of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1834 to 1910. In the early nineteenth century Serbia was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and was granted de facto independence from the Ottomans in 1817 (although the Ottomans still occupied Belgrade until 1867). With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire in the 1800s, and the expansion of other European powers such as Austria and Russia, Serbia's borders changed frequently and over time it gained stability and international acceptance as a new independent state. The population given here is not of the modern-day area of Serbia, but rather the nineteenth century Kingdom of Serbia, which was significantly smaller.

In 1834, the population of the Kingdom of Serbia was just 678 thousand people, although there were many ethnic Serbs living outside these borders under the rule of other kingdoms. The population then grew rather steadily to 1.35 million in 1874, before it grows to 1.9 million in 1884. This huge jump in the population is a result of the acquisition of new territory from the Ottomans, which added over 300,000 people to the Kingdom, and the new data also included military personnel, which was not included in the previous entries.

From 1884 onwards the population continues to grow, and it reaches 2.9 million people by 1910, which is the final collection of data before the First World War. World War I began on July 28th 1914 when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in retaliation for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo one month before. By the end of the war as many as 1.3 million Serbs died as a direct result of the conflict, which is the highest percentage of any overall population involved in the war, and almost sixty percent of all Serbian men died.

In 1800, the average child born in the region of present-day Turkey was expect to live to the age of 35. This figure would see little change for most of the 19th century, rising to just 36 years by the beginning of the 20th century. However, Turkey’s life expectancy would fall greatly with the beginning of the First World War in 1914, as both extensive wartime casualties and an organized campaign of mass execution and deportation of the Ottoman Empire's non-Turkish populations would result in the deaths of approximately three million people; the victims of the respective Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides are thought to make up over half of these deaths.

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, life expectancy in Turkey would begin to recover somewhat, but would proceed to fall again in the late 1930s, as the Great Depression and the Second World War would cause significant economic harm to the country, despite Turkey’s neutrality for much of the conflict. However, the 1950s would see Turkey’s population begin to grow rapidly, as the republic would begin to rapidly modernize both the country’s healthcare and economy, and mass immunization programs would lead to a sharp drop in child mortality. As a result, Turkey’s life expectancy would rise to over 68 years by 2000, with a slight increase beginning in the early 2000s after healthcare reforms in the country established universal healthcare in the country. As a result, in 2020, it is estimated that the average person born in Turkey will live to an age of just over 77 years.

With the UrbanOccupationsOETR, a European Research Council-funded research project hosted at Koç University 2016-2022, we wanted to highlight the importance of rural economic dynamics to explain differences in long-term regional economic development in the late Ottoman Empire. We provide an Excel dataset on the crop-specific agricultural mix and land area of an Ottoman region, Bursa, in the 1840s. This dataset is the result of a new geosampling methodology we devised, representing a key development in the agricultural and overall economic history of Southeast Europe and the Middle East.

The 1840s serve as a good period to choose for base years mainly due to three main factors to sample economic data on a regional scale. First, due to Tanzimat reforms (planned and only partially accomplished transformation of the Ottoman central administration in the mid-nineteenth century), the 1840s marked a watershed of bureaucratical information gathering. Especially, the temettuat registers were created as a by-product to realize a drastic change in tax collection. With at least in its first iteration, the unsuccessful abolishment of tax-farming by the Tanzimat decree in 1839, the Ottoman central administration aimed to transform the existing indirect and communal taxation with direct and individual modalities. To accomplish this goal, the administration had to survey the tax base, which was in disguise due to centuries-long tax farming practices. The temettuat registers were conducted in the core regions of the empire with the main exception of the imperial capital, Istanbul. Second, the 1840s correspond to the last period before the beginning of drastic territorial losses, primarily in Southeast Europe, which triggered in size and frequency unprecedented waves of emigration and immigration between the core territories of the empire both in Southeast Europe as well as in Anatolia, which continued until the official demise or the implosion of the empire. Third and lastly, the 1840s serves as a very suitable point to assess the dynamics of pre-industrial and ancienne regime agricultural dynamics due to the lack of modern means of mechanization, irrigation, and fertilization combined with extremely rudimentary transport facilities.

The temettuat surveys are invaluable resources for they provide agricultural asset- / crop-type specific agricultural mix information with cultivation area per household. However, extracting their detailed information requires a team and years. To overcome this, we developed a sampling strategy that selected five locations per subdistrict using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), considering factors of agricultural suitability (85% weight), connectivity to historical roads (within a 500-meter to the closest road or to the Danube, 15% weight, justified by its impact on suitability), and subdistrict population size (chosen villages must represent at least 5% of the subdistrict's total population).

Our geosampling methodology of the 1840s tax registers (temettuat) is based on contemporary Ottoman population registers. With this geosampling method, we aim to estimate the regional (district (sancak) and subdistrict (kaza)) level total area of cultivation and shares of the agricultural mix for key products. We are using two mid-nineteenth-century datasets: Ottoman tax (TMT) (temettuat) surveys for agricultural asset / crop type and cultivation area and the population (nüfus) (NFS) registers for population-based sampling. Connectivity is based on a detailed and provenly accurate 1940s German military map of Turkey, Deutsche Heereskarte (DHK). The agricultural suitability raster is an amalgamation of the Land Capability Classification (LCC) encapsulating the variables of soil quality and quantity and the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) based on Shuttle Radar Topography Mission with 30-meter-resolution and comprising elevation, slope, and ruggedness data.

In the end, a geosampling initiative was undertaken across six regions in Southeast Europe and Anatolia, namely Ankara, Bursa, Plovdiv, Ruse, Manisa, and Edirne, covering a total of 277 locations with 17,675 households. Our project team entered the economic data from those records into a Microsoft Access database. We employed a specially crafted data entry template to systematically organize the tax survey data into multiple categories.

After geosampling locations, our objective extended to deriving estimates for the total cultivated area within each subdistrict and regions. To achieve this goal, it was imperative that the data undergoes coding the cultivation areas into a standardized and comparable land-use scheme. We adopted the Corine Land Cover (CLC) nomenclature from the European Union's Earth Observation Programme (Copernicus), established in 1985 and regularly updated. Our study followed the revised guidelines issued by the European Environment Agency on 10.05.2019. Despite its primary design for contemporary land cover analysis, CLC nomenclature proved well-suited for accurately representing the agricultural tax data and the historical context of the 1845 Ottoman tax surveys.

In our analysis, we coded micro-level cultivated land entries associated with individual households, using CLC's highest detail level. Successfully, every cultivated land entry was coded into the third level of detail in CLC, encompassing sub-categories such as 2.1 – “Arable land”, 2.2 – “Permanent crops”, 2.3 – “Pastures”, and 2.4 – “Heterogeneous agricultural areas”—all falling under the overarching category of 2 - Agricultural areas. Additionally, we coded entries related to 3.1 - “Forest” and 3.2 – “Shrub and/or herbaceous vegetation associations”, falling under the primary category of 3 – “Forest and seminatural areas.”

Finally, cultivation area expressed in Ottoman measurement units like dönüm (1/9,2 of a hectare) are converted into hectares to ensure consistency and ease of spatiotemporal comparison.

We provide the geosample data of the Bursa region, positioned in Western Anatolia, renowned for its historical and economic significance, large and cosmopolitan population, and diverse geophysical characteristics. This data covers all the geosampled households, the individuals residing in them, and their CLC-coded agricultural assets / crops with quantity / cultivation area.

The Bursa region comprised 591 geolocated settlements in 12 subdistricts in 1840. Notably, the city of Bursa, serving as the major urban center and regional capital, was intentionally left out of the sample. Additionally, the subdistrict of Pazarköy, with its 14 settlements, was excluded. Despite being initially part of the Bursa region in population registers, it became attached to the northern neighboring Kocaili district in 1845. Consequently, out of the 576 remaining settlements, we geosampled 55 populated places from 11 subdistricts, covering 3547 households, representing 12% of the total households in the region, totaling 30,518. The variables of the tax surveys of the geosampled locations were read, extracted, and entered into the customized Microsoft Access database.

In the Bursa region, there are a total of 13,344 entries for agricultural assets coded with CLC across all 55 sampled populated areas. Our dataset includes all these entries and covers 3,325 households (out of the total of 3,547 sampled households) that owned these assets. This allows for a comprehensive analysis of the agricultural mix and land area at a detailed level.

The tax survey data was transcribed in Turkish using modern Turkish spelling and punctuation to keep the nuances of the original source. That said, because the original register information is largely presented in a standardized fashion and grouped under detailed variables, the data can easily be translated into other languages and coded into specific coding schemes.

The categories and descriptions of the variables of the geosample dataset for the Bursa region are as follows:

Key information about Turkey population

• The Turkey population reached 85.7 million people in Dec 2024, compared with the previously reported figure of 85.4 million people in Dec 2023
• The data reached an all-time high of 85.7 million people in Dec 2024 and a record low of 13.6 million people in Dec 1927

In 1844, Romania had a population of just 3.6 million people. During the early entries in this data, Romania's borders were very different and much smaller than today, and control of this area often switched hands between the Austrian, Ottoman and Russian empires. The populations during this time are based on estimates made for incomplete census data, and they show that the population grows from 3.6 million in 1844, doubling to 7.2 million in 1912, part of this growth is due to a high natural birth rate during this period, but also partly due to the changing of Romania's borders and annexation of new lands. During this time Romania gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878, and experienced a period of increased stability and progress.

Between 1912 and 1930 the population of Romania grew by over 10 million people. The main reason for this is the huge territories gained by Romania in the aftermath of the First World War. During the war Romania remained neutral for the first two years, after which it joined the allies; however, it was very quickly defeated and overrun by the Central Powers, and in total it lost over 600 thousand people as a direct result of the war. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires after the war, Romania gained almost double it's territory, which caused the population to soar to 18.1 million in 1930. The population then decreases by 1941 and again by 1948, as Romania seceded territory to neighboring countries and lost approximately half a million people during the Second World War. From 1948 onwards the population begins to grow again, reaching it's peak at 23.5 million people in 1990.

Like many other Eastern European countries, there was very limited freedom of movement from Romania during the Cold War, and communist rule was difficult for the Romanian people. The Romanian Revolution in 1989 ended communist rule in the country, Romania transitioned to a free-market society and movement from the country was allowed. Since then the population has fallen each year as more and more Romanians move abroad in search of work and opportunities. The population is expected to fall to 19.2 million in 2020, which is over 4 million fewer people than it had in 1990.

Bulgaria, with the help of the Russian Empire, achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. In the decades before independence, Bulgaria's population had remained between 2.2 and 2.8 million people, and growth was much slower then the following century. Although most at the time assumed that it would become a Russian ally, Bulgaria defied the expectations and aligned itself with the western powers, and developed into a modern European state by the turn in the late 1800s. Bulgaria at war In the early twentieth century Bulgaria was involved in both World Wars, as well as two Balkan Wars. The Balkan states were unhappy with the borders assigned to them by the western powers, and instead wanted to re-draw them based on the dispersal of ethnic groups. This led to the first Balkan War in 1912, which saw Bulgaria fight alongside Greece and Serbia against the Ottomans. Bulgaria fought the second Balkan War on all sides, this time against Greece, Serbia, Romania and the Ottomans, as the dispute over borders continued. Bulgaria was defeated this time, and sustained heavy casualties, amassing in 58 thousand fatalities and over 100 thousand wounded in the two wars.

In the First World War, Bulgaria remained neutral at first, in order to recover from the previous wars, but then aligned itself with the Central powers in 1915, and played a vital role in maintaining their control in the Balkans. While Bulgaria was initially successful, its allies weakened as the war progressed, and then Bulgaria eventually succumbed to Allied forces and surrendered in 1918, with almost 200 thousand Bulgarians dying as a result of the war. The interwar years was a period of political and economic turmoil, and when control was re-established, Bulgaria was then able to maintain it's neutrality throughout most of the Second World War, (although there was some conflict and bombings in certain areas). Rise and fall of communism After the war, Bulgaria became a communist state, and life became harsh for the civil population there until the late 1950s when the standard of living rose again. In the late 1980s, like many Eastern European countries, Bulgaria experienced economic decline as the communist system began to collapse. Political failures also contributed to this, and approximately 300 thousand Bulgarian Turks migrated to Turkey, greatly weakening the agricultural economy. This trend of mass migration abroad continued after the fall of the iron curtain, as well as the rise of unemployment. Bulgaria reached it's peak population size in 1985 at 8.98 million inhabitants, but then the number decreases each year, and is expected to be 6.94 million in 2020. This drop in population size has been attributed to the economic collapse at the end of communism in Eastern Europe, causing many to leave the country in search of work elsewhere. Bulgaria also has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, with 8.7 births per 1,000 people per year (in 2018).

In 1800, the region of modern-day North Macedonia had a population of approximately 392,000. The population grew steadily throughout the 19th century, and reached approximately 800,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. During this time the region was under Ottoman control, and was something of an ethnic melting pot, with significant shares of the population made up of Macedonians, Greeks, Turks, as well as other Slavic groups. The early-1900s saw control of the region pass between various powers, as the Ottoman Empire fell and gave way to a power vacuum in the Balkans. Following the Second World War, North Macedonia became a part of Yugoslavia; the war's end would also see a baby boom, along with increased population growth throughout the second half of the 20th century.

The gradual dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s gave way to the establishment of an independent Macedonia in 1991. This time also saw much emigration from the region, both within the former-region of Yugoslavia, as well as abroad; international migration was largely driven by economic factors, especially due to those associated with independence, as well as those associated with the strained political relationship with Greece. Disputes with Greece over the terms "Macedonia", "Macedonians", and their cultural significance, resulted in Greece blocking the country's applications to join the EU and NATO. Non-membership of both these organizations prevented the country from obtaining the associated socio-economic benefits for decades, before a referendum was held in 2018 to officially change the name to the "Republic of North Macedonia". Since this time, Greece has withdrawn its objections to North Macedonia's accession to the the EU and NATO, and the relationship between the two has improved. North Macedonia became a member of NATO in March 2020, however disputes with Bulgaria arose in November of the same year, which have further delayed accession to the EU. Over the past two decades, North Macedonia's population has grown, although it has remained fairly constant at just over two million people.

In 1800, the population of Cyprus was approximately 185 thousand people, a population which would remain stagnant throughout most of the 19th century. However, following the re-administration of Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire to the United Kingdom during the 1878 Cyprus Convention, when it became an integral part of Britain's military presence in the Mediterranean, the population of Cyprus began to grow. It reached over 400,000 people by the beginning of the Second World War, but would plateau at approximately 580 thousand in the early-1960s, after Cyprus, like many British colonies in the decades following the Second World War, gained independence from the empire. Cyprus crises 1960s and 1970s There were several periods of conflict and political instability on either side of this transition, as nationalist uprisings led to eventual independence, but this was soon followed by an split between Cyprus' ethnic Greek and Turkish populations. To summarize, Turkish Cypriots, who made up just under twenty percent of the population, felt they were being given a minority status and were not treated as equal citizens to the Greek Cypriots; the 1960s were characterized by political crises and tensions, exacerbated by foreign pressure from the Greek and Turkish governments. In July 1974, the military regime in mainland Greece orchestrated a coup d'état in Cyprus, in an attempt to annex the island, but five days later Turkish forces invaded northern Cyprus, taking control of roughly one-third of the island within two months. Over one thousand people died in the invasion, before a ceasefire was established, and then almost one third of the entire population were relocated to the respective region of their ethnic origin. The United Nations established a buffer zone between the Greek and Turkish regions of Cyprus, which remains the de facto border between the two regions today. Post-split Cyprus Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, and the Eurozone in 2008. Cyprus is considered a developed nation with a high-income economy and booming tourism sector. Tensions between the Greek and Turkish regions of Cyprus have gradually eased in the decades since partition, with increased freedom of movement between the north and south; however, in 2020, Turkish oil probes in the Mediterranean have crossed into Cypriot waters, which has worsened relations with the EU and wider international community. Cyprus' population reached one million people in the early 2000s, and in 2020 it is estimated to be just over 1.2 million people.

With the UrbanOccupationsOETR, a European Research Councill, Starting Grant funded (Grant Number 679097, Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850-2000, UrbanOccupationsOETR) project hosted at Koç University 2016-2022, we wanted to highlight the importance of rural economic dynamics to explain differences in long-term regional economic development in the late Ottoman Empire. We provide an Excel dataset on the crop-specific agricultural mix and land area of an Ottoman region, Bursa, in the 1840s. This dataset is the result of a new geosampling methodology we devised, representing a novel development in the agricultural and overall economic history of Southeast Europe and the Middle East.

The 1840s serve as a good period to choose for base years mainly due to three main factors to sample economic data on a regional scale. First, due to Tanzimat reforms (planned and only partially accomplished transformation of the Ottoman central administration in the mid-nineteenth century), the 1840s marked a watershed of bureaucratical information gathering. Especially, the temettuat registers were created as a by-product to realize a drastic change in tax collection. With at least in its first iteration, the unsuccessful abolishment of tax-farming by the Tanzimat decree in 1839, the Ottoman central administration aimed to transform the existing indirect and communal taxation with direct and individual modalities. To accomplish this goal, the administration had to survey the tax base, which was in disguise due to centuries-long tax farming practices. The temettuat registers were conducted in the core regions of the empire with the main exception of the imperial capital, Istanbul. Second, the 1840s correspond to the last period before the beginning of drastic territorial losses, primarily in Southeast Europe, which triggered in size and frequency unprecedented waves of emigration and immigration between the core territories of the empire both in Southeast Europe as well as in Anatolia, which continued until the official demise or the implosion of the empire. Third and lastly, the 1840s serves as a very suitable point to assess the dynamics of pre-industrial and ancienne regime agricultural dynamics due to the lack of modern means of mechanization, irrigation, and fertilization combined with extremely rudimentary transport facilities.

The temettuat surveys are invaluable resources for they provide agricultural asset- / crop-type specific agricultural mix information with cultivation area per household. However, extracting their detailed information requires a team and years. To overcome this, we developed a sampling strategy that selected five locations per subdistrict using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), considering factors of agricultural suitability (85% weight), connectivity to historical roads (within a 500-meter to the closest road or to the Danube, 15% weight, justified by its impact on suitability), and subdistrict population size (chosen villages must represent at least 5% of the subdistrict's total population).

Our geosampling methodology of the 1840s tax registers (temettuat) is based on contemporary Ottoman population registers. With this geosampling method, we aim to estimate the regional (district (sancak) and subdistrict (kaza)) level total area of cultivation and shares of the agricultural mix for key products. We are using two mid-nineteenth-century datasets: Ottoman tax (TMT) (temettuat) surveys for crop type and cultivation area and the population (nüfus) (NFS) registers for population-based sampling. Connectivity is based on a detailed and provenly accurate 1940s German military map of Turkey, Deutsche Heereskarte (DHK). The agricultural suitability raster is an amalgamation of the Land Capability Classification (LCC) encapsulating the variables of soil quality and quantity and the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) based on Shuttle Radar Topography Mission with 30-meter-resolution and comprising elevation, slope, and ruggedness data.

In the end, a geosampling initiative was undertaken across six regions in Southeast Europe and Anatolia, namely Ankara, Bursa, Plovdiv, Ruse, Manisa, and Edirne, covering a total of 277 locations with 17,675 households. Our project team entered the economic data from those records into a Microsoft Access database. We employed a specially crafted data entry template to organize the tax survey data into multiple categories systematically.

After geosampling locations, our objective extended to deriving estimates for the total cultivated area within each subdistrict and region. To achieve this goal, it was imperative that the data undergoes coding the cultivation areas into a standardized and comparable land-use scheme. We adopted the Corine Land Cover (CLC) nomenclature from the European Union's Earth Observation Programme (Copernicus), established in 1985 and regularly updated. Our study followed the revised guidelines issued by the European Environment Agency on 10.05.2019. Despite its primary design for contemporary land cover analysis, CLC nomenclature proved well-suited for accurately representing the agricultural tax data and the historical context of the 1845 Ottoman tax surveys.

In our analysis, we coded micro-level cultivated land entries associated with individual households by using CLC's highest detail level. Successfully, every cultivated land entry was coded into the third level of detail in CLC, encompassing sub-categories such as 2.1 – “Arable land”, 2.2 – “Permanent crops”, 2.3 – “Pastures”, and 2.4 – “Heterogeneous agricultural areas”—all falling under the overarching category of 2 - Agricultural areas. Additionally, we coded entries related to 3.1 - “Forest” and 3.2 – “Shrub and/or herbaceous vegetation associations”, falling under the primary category of 3 – “Forest and seminatural areas.”

Finally, cultivation areas expressed in Ottoman measurement units like dönüm (1/9,2 of a hectare) were converted into hectares to ensure consistency and ease of spatiotemporal comparison.

This Zenodo dataset offers agricultural data for the entire geosampling area per household. It includes 39,002 agricultural entries coded according to CLC, detailing both the quantity and the cultivated area, corresponding to 14,997 individuals across 13,564 households. Please note that this is a rural geosample. Although the tax surveys of the primary (urban) and secondary (subdistrict centers) locations of all regions were read and entered, they are not included in this dataset.

The categories and descriptions of the variables of the geosample dataset are as follows:

Albania, then known as Rumelia, was a province of the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth century until it declared it's independence in 1912. Following a series of unsuccessful uprisings and brief occupations from nearby Serbia and Greece, Albania finally claimed its independence on November 28, 1912; however the Conference of London in 1913 then set the borders of the former-Ottoman states in Southern Europe, which left many ethnic Albanians living in other neighboring states, particularly Serbia (and what is now Kosovo). The newly-formed Albanian state collapsed in the wake of the First World War, and was controlled in parts by Greece, Italy and Serbia. The Paris Conference then established an independent Albanian state, which led to a period of political and economic turmoil that lasted until Italy's annexation of the region in 1939, during the Second World War. It is estimated that just under 3 percent of Albania's population perished as a direct result of the war, as Albania became the main theater for the Axis Powers' war against Greece. Italy then surrendered control of the area to Germany in 1943, and after the war ended in 1945, Albania became a Yugoslav satellite state and remained behind the Iron Curtain until it's collapse in the 1990s. Steady growth during the communist era From the war's end onwards, Albania's population enjoyed steady growth and almost tripled by 1990. Throughout this time, Albania underwent a series of political allegiances; first as a Yugoslav and then Soviet satellite states, but then became an important actor in the Sino-Soviet split, eventually siding with China in the 1960s. Gradually, Albania transitioned into a more isolationist and independent country in in the 1970s, and slowly adopted some more democratic practices. The total population surpassed two million people in the late 1960s, and three million in the late 1980s, but then a dramatic change in population growth occurred in the 1990s, as communism in Europe came to an end. Immediate decline following communism's end Increased freedom of movement, improved access to contraception and major lifestyle changes caused the population to fall into decline. The population did increase in the late 90s, despite a civil war in the first half of 1997 (in which over 2 thousand people died) sparked by a failure of the financial system in Albania. The Albanian Army was also involved in the war in neighboring Kosovo between 1998 and 1999. The 2000s brought about further decline, and the population is just 2.9 million in 2020, a decline of approximately 400,000 people in thirty years. Albania has been a candidate for accession to the EU since 2014, and membership would bring further change to the country.

In 1800, the population of modern day Algeria was estimated to be around 2.5 million people, and by the turn of the twentieth century it had almost doubled to five million. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, Algeria was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, however an invasion by France in 1830 was the beginning of 130 years of French rule, and the development of Algeria's modern borders by 1875 (although northern Algeria was treated as an extension of the French metropole, with elected representatives in the Assembly). Although the rest of the century saw both medicinal and economic progress, French rule also dismantled traditional Algerian political and societal structures, as well as the oppression of Islam, particularly in rural areas. Algeria in the early 1900s The first few decades of the twentieth century saw increasing Algerian and Islamic influence in local government. Throughout both World Wars, Algerian soldiers played an integral part in the French military, and were responsible for Algeria's liberation from Nazi Germany, as well as decisive campaigns in Italy and France. Although Algerian troops often made up the first wave of soldiers to go into battle, they did not receive the same treatment or pay as their French counterparts, and Algerian veterans did not receive the same rights as French veterans until 2017. As Europe's control over its colonies weakened in the mid-1900s, independence movements in countries such as Algeria gained momentum, and the Algerian War of Independence was one of the most violent and arduous during this time. Although it began as guerilla warfare in 1952, a series of massacres and reprisals led to all-out war in 1955, between the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the French-Algerian government. Up to one million Algerian's lost their lives in the war, and approximately twenty percent of the Muslim population became refugees. The war ended in March 1962, through the Evian Accords, and Algeria's independence was acknowledged on July 3, 1962. Independent Algeria In the aftermath of the war, there was a mass exodus of ethnic Europeans, as well as the systematic genocide of thousands of pro-French Algerians who remained in the country. Much of Algeria's agriculture had been destroyed, it's economy was left without structure as the majority of those in positions of power returned to Europe, and seventy percent of the workforce was unemployed. Relative peace followed and the country slowly modernized over the next three decades, however military rule failed to sufficiently stabilize the country, and the government's attempts to suppress Islam's influence in politics eventually led to a civil war in 1992. The civil war involved different factions with Islamic and pro-government agendas, and was very regionalized. The high number of massacres eventually led to splits within all paramilitary factions, which the government then capitalized on to re-establish control, and the war effectively ended in 2002. Since then, the military's control over Algerian politics has gradually decreased, and Algeria has become more peaceful and democratic (however they have not had an elected President since April 2019). Increased stability has also allowed the population to grow exponentially, and today it is almost 44 million people, double what it was in the mid-1980s.

The article is devoted to the study of the charitable activities of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Russian-Turkish war (1877-1878). During the war years, the Church always took an active part in protecting the state from enemies. Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 is one of the most significant examples of such interaction. It should be noted that this military campaign was of particular importance for the Russian Orthodox Church, since its goal was to liberate the Orthodox peoples of the Balkan Peninsula from the power of the Ottoman Empire. For many years, Russian clergymen maintained contact with the Balkan clergy, providing them all possible assistance. During the Russo-Turkish war the Church’s charitable activities have reached unprecedented proportions.

Such activities began before the outbreak of war. The church hierarchs contributed to the creation of sisters of mercy organizations capable of working in military conditions. During the military campaign period, the Russian clergy launched active efforts to organize assistance to the active army and wounded soldiers. During the sermons, the priests urged the congregation to actively donate money and things. Representatives of the Church themselves also made a significant contribution for this purpose. A special role was played by the provincial, primarily the rural clergy, since the bulk of the population of the empire at that time were peasants.

In our opinion, the Russian Orthodox Church made a very significant contribution to the organization and implementation of charitable activities during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878. This greatly helped the soldiers, and also assisted the families of those killed in the war.

Methods The article is based on a systematic approach. Its usage in considering the problem allowed the author to research the interrelation of general trends in the relations between the Church and the army in the sphere of charity.

Also the principles of historicism and complexity have been used. Based on the principle of historicism, the author comprehensively evaluated the facts and documents of the past taking into account the specific features of the studied period. Following the principle of complexity, it was possible to obtain scientific knowledge about the general trends in the development of the Church charitable activity on the basis of a variety of identified sources and scientific works.

BACKGROUND:

Turkey is a crossroads of major population movements throughout history and has been a hotspot of cultural interactions. Several studies have investigated the complex population history of Turkey through a limited set of genetic markers. However, to date, there have been no studies to assess the genetic variation at the whole genome level using whole genome sequencing. Here, we present whole genome sequences of 16 Turkish individuals resequenced at high coverage (32×-48×).

RESULTS:

We show that the genetic variation of the contemporary Turkish population clusters with South European populations, as expected, but also shows signatures of relatively recent contribution from ancestral East Asian populations. In addition, we document a significant enrichment of non-synonymous private alleles, consistent with recent observations in European populations. A number of variants associated with skin color and total cholesterol levels show frequency differentiation between the Turkish populations and European populations. Furthermore, we have analyzed the 17q21.31 inversion polymorphism region (MAPT locus) and found increased allele frequency of 31.25% for H1/H2 inversion polymorphism when compared to European populations that show about 25% of allele frequency.

CONCLUSION:

This study provides the first map of common genetic variation from 16 western Asian individuals and thus helps fill an important geographical gap in analyzing natural human variation and human migration. Our data will help develop population-specific experimental designs for studies investigating disease associations and demographic history in Turkey.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's total population grew at quite a steady rate from the early nineteenth century until the mid-1900s, increasing from 852,000 people in 1818 to 2.7 million in 1950. Following the Second World War, the population grew at an even faster rate, reaching 4.5 million people by the end of the 1980s. Throughout this period, Bosnia and Herzegovina was never an independent country, as it belonged to the Ottoman Empire until 1875, before it was then annexed by Austria-Hungary until the First World War, after which it became a part of Yugoslavia. During this time, ethnic Bosnians (the majority of which were Muslim) often faced oppression and persecution, and even mass genocide during the Second World War (when it was briefly annexed by Croatia, which was a puppet state of Nazi Germany). The Bosnian War From 1989 onwards, Bosnia's population decreased drastically, by approximately 750,000 people by the end of the century. This sudden change coincides with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, where the country experienced economic instability in the 1980s and then the independence of its internal states in the early 90s; Bosnia and Herzegovina itself became independent in 1992. The formation of an independent state lead to civil unrest among the different ethnic groups within Bosnia and Herzegovina, resulting in the Bosnian War that caused the deaths of approximately 100 thousand people, as well as the displacement of over 2.2 million. Modern Bosnia and Herzegovina Since this period in Bosnia and Herzegovina's history the population has never recovered, and a further decline in the past decade has seen the population fall below 3.3 million people in 2020; which is a decrease of more than one million people since the war. As the country seemingly comes to terms with its difficult past, and deals with high unemployment and ethnic tensions; there are some indicators for a brighter outlook for Bosnia and Herzegovina's future. Today, Bosnia and Herzegovina is seen as a developing country and economy, it is an applicant for both EU and NATO membership, and an emerging tourism sector may provide much-needed employment across the country.

In 1800, the population of Yemen was just under 2.6 million, and would gradually grow to just 3.2 million by the end of the 18th century. Between the mid-1800s and early-1900s, the north and south regions of present-day Yemen had been split into territories of the British and Ottoman empires respectively; the north became independent in 1918, during Ottoman dissolution, while the British did not withdraw from the region until 1967. Yemen would experience an exponential growth in population in the years beginning in the 1970s, following the discovery of petroleum in the country, though this would slow somewhat in the 1990s, in part the result of food shortages and instability throughout the country years following the unification of South Yemen and the Yemen Arab Republic. In 2020, the population of Yemen is estimated to be just under thirty million people, however, the country has been experiencing a civil war in since 2015, which has resulted in one of the most severe humanitarian crises in recent history, with over 100,000 deaths (mostly children, due to famine) as well as the displacement of millions of people, and one of the most severe cholera outbreaks in recent decades.