Washington, D.C.
Washington, D. C. formally the District of Columbia and referred to as Washington or D. C. is the capital of the United States. Founded after the American Revolution as the seat of government of the newly independent country, Washington was named after George Washington, first President of the United States and Founding Father; as the seat of the United States federal government and several international organizations, Washington is an important world political capital. The city is one of the most visited cities in the world, with more than 20 million tourists annually; the signing of the Residence Act on July 16, 1790, approved the creation of a capital district located along the Potomac River on the country's East Coast. The U. S. Constitution provided for a federal district under the exclusive jurisdiction of the U. S. Congress, the District is therefore not a part of any state; the states of Maryland and Virginia each donated land to form the federal district, which included the pre-existing settlements of Georgetown and Alexandria.
The City of Washington was founded in 1791 to serve as the new national capital. In 1846, Congress returned the land ceded by Virginia. Washington had an estimated population of 702,455 as of July 2018, making it the 20th most populous city in the United States. Commuters from the surrounding Maryland and Virginia suburbs raise the city's daytime population to more than one million during the workweek. Washington's metropolitan area, the country's sixth largest, had a 2017 estimated population of 6.2 million residents. All three branches of the U. S. federal government are centered in the District: Congress and the U. S. Supreme Court. Washington is home to many national monuments, museums situated on or around the National Mall; the city hosts 177 foreign embassies as well as the headquarters of many international organizations, trade unions, non-profit, lobbying groups, professional associations, including the World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization of American States, AARP, the National Geographic Society, the Human Rights Campaign, the International Finance Corporation, the American Red Cross.
A locally elected mayor and a 13‑member council have governed the District since 1973. However, Congress may overturn local laws. D. C. residents elect a non-voting, at-large congressional delegate to the House of Representatives, but the District has no representation in the Senate. The District receives three electoral votes in presidential elections as permitted by the Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1961. Various tribes of the Algonquian-speaking Piscataway people inhabited the lands around the Potomac River when Europeans first visited the area in the early 17th century. One group known as the Nacotchtank maintained settlements around the Anacostia River within the present-day District of Columbia. Conflicts with European colonists and neighboring tribes forced the relocation of the Piscataway people, some of whom established a new settlement in 1699 near Point of Rocks, Maryland. In his Federalist No. 43, published January 23, 1788, James Madison argued that the new federal government would need authority over a national capital to provide for its own maintenance and safety.
Five years earlier, a band of unpaid soldiers besieged Congress while its members were meeting in Philadelphia. Known as the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, the event emphasized the need for the national government not to rely on any state for its own security. Article One, Section Eight, of the Constitution permits the establishment of a "District as may, by cession of particular states, the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States". However, the Constitution does not specify a location for the capital. In what is now known as the Compromise of 1790, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson came to an agreement that the federal government would pay each state's remaining Revolutionary War debts in exchange for establishing the new national capital in the southern United States. On July 9, 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, which approved the creation of a national capital on the Potomac River; the exact location was to be selected by President George Washington, who signed the bill into law on July 16.
Formed from land donated by the states of Maryland and Virginia, the initial shape of the federal district was a square measuring 10 miles on each side, totaling 100 square miles. Two pre-existing settlements were included in the territory: the port of Georgetown, founded in 1751, the city of Alexandria, founded in 1749. During 1791–92, Andrew Ellicott and several assistants, including a free African American astronomer named Benjamin Banneker, surveyed the borders of the federal district and placed boundary stones at every mile point. Many of the stones are still standing. A new federal city was constructed on the north bank of the Potomac, to the east of Georgetown. On September 9, 1791, the three commissioners overseeing the capital's construction named the city in honor of President Washington; the federal district was named Columbia, a poetic name for the United States in use at that time. Congress held its first session in Washington on November 17, 1800. Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 that organized the District and placed the entire territory under the exclusive control of the federal
Turkey
Turkey the Republic of Turkey, is a transcontinental country located in Western Asia, with a smaller portion on the Balkan Peninsula in Southeast Europe. East Thrace, located in Europe, is separated from Anatolia by the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorous strait and the Dardanelles. Turkey is bordered by Bulgaria to its northwest. Istanbul is the largest city. 70 to 80 per cent of the country's citizens identify as Turkish. Kurds are the largest minority. At various points in its history, the region has been inhabited by diverse civilizations including the Assyrians, Thracians, Phrygians and Armenians. Hellenization continued into the Byzantine era; the Seljuk Turks began migrating into the area in the 11th century, their victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 symbolizes the start and foundation of Turkey. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm ruled Anatolia until the Mongol invasion in 1243, when it disintegrated into small Turkish principalities. Beginning in the late 13th-century, the Ottomans started uniting these Turkish principalities.
After Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman expansion continued under Selim I. During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent the Ottoman Empire encompassed much of Southeast Europe, West Asia and North Africa and became a world power. In the following centuries the state entered a period of decline with a gradual loss of territories and wars. In an effort to consolidate the weakening social and political foundations of the empire, Mahmut II started a period of modernisation in the early 19th century, bringing reforms in all areas of the state including the military and bureaucracy along with the emancipation of all citizens. In 1913, a coup d'état put the country under the control of the Three Pashas. During World War I, the Ottoman government committed genocides against its Armenian and Pontic Greek subjects. Following the war, the conglomeration of territories and peoples that comprised the Ottoman Empire was partitioned into several new states; the Turkish War of Independence, initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his colleagues against occupying Allied Powers, resulted in the abolition of monarchy in 1922 and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, with Atatürk as its first president.
Atatürk enacted numerous reforms, many of which incorporated various aspects of Western thought and customs into the new form of Turkish government. The Kurdish–Turkish conflict, an armed conflict between the Republic of Turkey and Kurdish insurgents, has been active since 1984 in the southeast of the country. Various Kurdish groups demand separation from Turkey to create an independent Kurdistan or to have autonomy and greater political and cultural rights for Kurds in Turkey. Turkey is a charter member of the UN, an early member of NATO, the IMF and the World Bank, a founding member of the OECD, OSCE, BSEC, OIC and G-20. After becoming one of the first members of the Council of Europe in 1949, Turkey became an associate member of the EEC in 1963, joined the EU Customs Union in 1995 and started accession negotiations with the European Union in 2005 which have been stopped by the EU in 2017 due to "Turkey's path toward autocratic rule". Turkey's economy and diplomatic initiatives led to its recognition as a regional power while its location has given it geopolitical and strategic importance throughout history.
Turkey is a secular, unitary parliamentary republic which adopted a presidential system with a referendum in 2017. Turkey's current administration headed by president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of the AKP has enacted measures to increase the influence of Islam, undermine Kemalist policies and freedom of the press; the English name of Turkey means "land of the Turks". Middle English usage of Turkye is evidenced in an early work by Chaucer called The Book of the Duchess; the phrase land of Torke is used in the 15th-century Digby Mysteries. Usages can be found in the Dunbar poems, the 16th century Manipulus Vocabulorum and Francis Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum; the modern spelling "Turkey" dates back to at least 1719. The Turkish name Türkiye was adopted in 1923 under the influence of European usage; the Anatolian peninsula, comprising most of modern Turkey, is one of the oldest permanently settled regions in the world. Various ancient Anatolian populations have lived in Anatolia, from at least the Neolithic period until the Hellenistic period.
Many of these peoples spoke the Anatolian languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European language family. In fact, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical centre from which the Indo-European languages radiated; the European part of Turkey, called Eastern Thrace, has been inhabited since at least forty thousand years ago, is known to have been in the Neolithic era by about 6000 BC. Göbekli Tepe is the site of the oldest known man-made religious structure, a temple dating to circa 10,000 BC, while Çatalhöyük is a large Neolithic and Chalcolithic settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately
Union for a Popular Movement
The Union for a Popular Movement was a centre-right political party in France, one of the two major contemporary political parties in France along with the centre-left Socialist Party. The UMP was formed in 2002 as a merger of several centre-right parties under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac. In May 2015, the party was succeeded by The Republicans. Nicolas Sarkozy the president of the UMP, was elected President of France in the 2007 presidential election, but was defeated by PS candidate François Hollande in a run-off five years later. After the November 2012 party congress, the UMP experienced internal fractioning and was plagued by monetary scandals which forced its president, Jean-François Copé, to resign. After his re-election as UMP president in November 2014, Sarkozy put forward an amendment to change the name of the party into The Republicans, approved and came into effect on 30 May 2015; the UMP enjoyed an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 to 2012 and was a member of the European People's Party, the Centrist Democrat International and the International Democrat Union.
Since the 1980s, the political groups of the parliamentary right have joined forces around the values of economic liberalism and the building of Europe. Their rivalries had contributed to their defeat in the 1988 legislative elections. Before the 1993 legislative election, the Gaullist Rally for the Republic and the centrist Union for French Democracy formed an electoral alliance, the Union for France. However, in the 1995 presidential campaign they were both divided between followers of Jacques Chirac, elected, supporters of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. After their defeat in the 1997 legislative election, the RPR and UDF created the Alliance for France in order to coordinate the actions of their parliamentary groups. Before the 2002 presidential campaign, the supporters of President Jacques Chirac, divided in three centre-right parliamentary parties, founded an association named Union on the Move. After Chirac's re-election, in order to contest the legislative election jointly, the Union for the Presidential Majority was created.
It was as such established as a permanent organisation. The UMP was the merger of the Gaullist-conservative Rally for the Republic, the conservative-liberal party Liberal Democracy, a sizeable portion of the Union for French Democracy, more the UDF's Christian Democrats, the Radical Party and the centrist Popular Party for French Democracy. In the UMP four major French political families were thus represented: Gaullism, Christian democracy and radicalism. Chirac's close ally Alain Juppé became the party's first president at the party's founding congress at the Bourget in November 2002. Juppé won 79.42% of the vote, defeating Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the leader of the party's Eurosceptic Arise the Republic faction, three other candidates. During the party's earlier years, it was marked by tensions and rivalries between Juppé and other chiraquiens and supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-Minister of the Interior. In the 2004 regional elections the UMP suffered a heavy blow, winning the presidencies of only 2 out of 22 regions in metropolitan France and only half of the departments in the simultaneous 2004 cantonal elections.
In the 2004 European Parliament election on 13 June 2004, the UMP suffered another heavy blow, winning 16.6% of the vote, far behind the Socialist Party, only 16 seats. Juppé resigned the party's presidency on 15 July 2004 after being found guilty in a corruption scandal in January of the same year. Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would take over the presidency of the UMP and resign his position as finance minister, ending months of speculation. On 28 November 2004, Sarkozy was elected to the party's presidency with 85.09% of the votes against 9.1% for Dupont-Aignan and 5.82% for Christine Boutin, the leader of the UMP's social conservatives. Having gained control of what had been Chirac's party, Sarkozy focused the party machinery and his energies on the 2007 presidential election; the failure of the referendum on the European Constitution on 25 May 2005 led to the fall of the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and to the formation of a new cabinet, presided by another UMP politician, Dominique de Villepin.
However, during this time, the UMP under Sarkozy gained a record number of new members and rejuvenated itself in preparation of the 2007 election. On 14 January 2007, Sarkozy was nominated unopposed as the UMP's presidential candidate for the 2007 election. On the issues, the party under Sarkozy publicly disapproved of Turkey's proposed membership in the European Union, which Chirac had endorsed several times publicly, took a more right-wing position. On 22 April 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy won the plurality of votes in the first round of the 2007 presidential election. On 6 May he faced the Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal in the second round and won, taking 53.06% of the vote. As a consequence, he resigned from the presidency of the UMP on 14 May 2007, two days before becoming President of the French Republic. François Fillon was appointed Prime Minister. On 17 June 2007, at a
1993 French legislative election
French legislative elections took place on 21 and 28 March 1993 to elect the tenth National Assembly of the Fifth Republic. Since 1988, President François Mitterrand and his Socialist cabinets had relied on a relative parliamentary majority. In an attempt to avoid having to work with the Communists, Prime Minister Michel Rocard tried to gain support from the UDF by appointing four UDF ministers. After the UDF withdrew its support for the government in 1991, Rocard and the UDF ministers resigned; the UDF became allied with the Gaullist Rally for the Republic. The Socialist Party was further weakened by scandals and an intense rivalry between François Mitterrand's potential successors. In March 1992, the Socialists were punished at the local elections. Prime Minister Édith Cresson was replaced by Pierre Bérégovoy; the latter promised to fight against economic recession and corruption, but he was himself suspected to have received a loan from a controversial businessman, Roger-Patrice Pelat. The election was a landslide victory for the RPR-UDF alliance, while the PS and their left-wing allies received their worst result since the 1960s.
The PS lost nearly 80 % of the seats. This caused a crisis within the PS. Jospin announced his political retirement. Depressed by the defeat and the accusations about the loan from Pelat, Pierre Bérégovoy committed suicide on 1 May; some traditional PS voters had voted for the Greens in the first round. These ecologists obtained a total of 10.84%, making this the best total score for French Green parties in legislative elections. However, only two ecologists qualified for the runoff, including Dominique Voynet in her constituency in the Doubs département. Both of these candidates were defeated. Lack of major political allies for these ecologists explained this failure to take any seats; the RPR-UDF coalition formed the largest parliamentary majority since 1958, taking a total of 485 seats or 84% of the 577 seats. The RPR leader Jacques Chirac demanded President Mitterrand's resignation and refused to be Prime Minister in a new "cohabitation" government, he suggested the nomination of his former RPR Finance Minister Edouard Balladur at the head of the government.
Balladur promised publicly. The second "cohabitation" finished with the 1995 presidential election
Hutu
The Hutu known as the Abahutu, are a Bantu ethnic or social group native to the African Great Lakes region of Africa, an area now in Burundi and Rwanda. They live in Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they form one of the principal population divisions alongside the Tutsi and the Twa; the Hutu is the largest of the four main population divisions in Rwanda. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, 84% of Rwandans and 85% of Burundians are Hutu, with Tutsis the next largest ethnic group at 15% and 14% of residents in Rwanda and Burundi, respectively; the Twa pygmies, the smallest of the two countries' principal populations share language and culture with the Hutu and Tutsi. However, they are distinguished by a shorter stature; the Hutu are believed to have first emigrated to the Great Lake region from West Africa in the great Bantu expansion. Various theories have emerged to explain the purported physical differences between them and their fellow Bantu-speaking neighbors, the Tutsi.
These pastoralists were reckoned to have established aristocracies over the sedentary Hutu and Twa. Through intermarriage with the local Bantus, the herders were assimilated culturally and racially. An alternate theory is that the Hutu and Tutsi belonged to the same Bantu population, but were artificially divided by German and Belgian colonists so that the Tutsi minority could serve as local overseers for Berlin and Brussels; the latter view has received support among proponents of Rwandan national unity, but has been criticized as an attempt at historical revisionism. Still others suggest that the two groups are related but not identical, that differences between them were exacerbated by Europeans, or by a gradual, natural split, as those who owned cattle became known as Tutsi and those who did not became Hutu. Mahmood Mamdani states that the Belgian colonial power designated people as Tutsi or Hutu on the basis of cattle ownership, physical measurements and church records. There is an ongoing debate as to whether the Hutu and Tutsi are separate groups or not.
Modern-day genetic studies of the Y-chromosome suggest that the Hutu, like the Tutsi, are of Bantu extraction. Paternal genetic influences associated with the Horn of Africa and North Africa are few, are ascribed to much earlier inhabitants who were assimilated. However, the Hutu have fewer Nilo-Saharan paternal lineages than the Tutsi. In general, the Hutu appear to share a close genetic kinship with neighboring Bantu populations the Tutsi. However, it is unclear whether this similarity is due to extensive genetic exchanges between these communities through intermarriage or whether it stems from common origins: generations of gene flow obliterated whatever clear-cut physical distinctions may have once existed between these two Bantu peoples – renowned to be height, body build, facial features. With a spectrum of physical variation in the peoples, Belgian authorities mandated ethnic affiliation in the 1920s, based on economic criteria. Formal and discrete social divisions were imposed upon ambiguous biological distinctions.
To some extent, the permeability of these categories in the intervening decades helped to reify the biological distinctions, generating a taller elite and a shorter underclass, but with little relation to the gene pools that had existed a few centuries ago. The social categories are thus real, but there is little if any detectable genetic differentiation between Hutu and Tutsi. Tishkoff et al. found their mixed Hutu and Tutsi samples from Rwanda to be predominately of Bantu origin, with minor gene flow from Afro-Asiatic communities. Hutus speak Rwanda-Rundi as their native tongue, a member of the Bantu subgroup of the Niger–Congo language family. Rwanda-Rundi is subdivided into the Kinyarwanda and Kirundi dialects, which have been standardized as official languages of Rwanda and Burundi respectively, it is spoken as a mother tongue by the Tutsi and Twa. Additionally, many Hutu speak French, the other official language of Rwanda and Burundi, as a lingua franca; the Belgian-sponsored Tutsi monarchy survived until 1959.
In Burundi, who are the minority, maintained control of the government and military. In Rwanda, the political power was transferred from the minority Tutsi to the majority Hutu. In Rwanda, this led to the "Social revolution" and Hutu violence against Tutsis. Tens of thousands of Tutsis were killed and many others fled to neighboring countries, such as Burundi and expanding the Banyamulenge Tutsi ethnic group in the South Kivu region of the Belgian Congo. Exiled Tutsis from Burundi invaded Rwanda, prompting Rwanda to close its border with Burundi. In Burundi, a campaign of genocide was conducted against Hutu population in 1972, an estimated 100,000 Hutus died. In 1993, Burundi's first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, Hutu, was believed to be assassinated by Tutsi officers, as was the person constitutionally entitled to succeed him; this sparked a genocide in Burundi between Hutu political structures and the Tutsi military, in which an estimated 500,000 Burundians died. There were many mass killings of moderate Hutus.
While Tutsi remained in control of Burundi, the conflict resulted in genocide in Rwanda as well. A Tutsi rebel group, the R
İzmir
İzmir is a metropolitan city in the western extremity of Anatolia and the third most populous city in Turkey, after Istanbul and Ankara. It is the second most metropolitan area on the Aegean Sea after Greece. In 2017, the city of İzmir had a population of 3,028,323, while İzmir Province had a total population of 4,279,677. İzmir's metropolitan area extends along the outlying waters of the Gulf of İzmir and inland to the north across the Gediz River delta. In classical antiquity the city was known as Smyrna, a name which remained in use in English and other foreign languages until the Turkish Postal Service Law of 28 March 1930 came into effect, which sought to make the Turkish name İzmir the internationally recognized name of the city in most languages. However, the historic name Smyrna is still used today in some languages, such as Greek and Spanish. İzmir and Smyrna have more than 3,000 years of recorded urban history, up to 8,500 years of history as a human settlement since the Neolithic period.
Lying on an advantageous location at the head of a gulf running down in a deep indentation, midway along the western Anatolian coast, it has been one of the principal mercantile cities of the Mediterranean Sea for much of its history. İzmir hosted the Mediterranean Games in 1971 and the World University Games in 2005. The city of İzmir is composed of several metropolitan districts. Of these, the district of Konak corresponds to historical İzmir, with this district's area having constituted the city's central "İzmir Municipality" until 1984. With the formation of the "Greater İzmir Metropolitan Municipality", the city of İzmir grouped together its ten urban districts, namely Balçova, Bayraklı, Buca, Çiğli, Karabağlar, Karşıyaka and Narlıdere. In an ongoing process, the Mayor of İzmir was vested with authority over additional districts outside the city proper, extending from Bergama in the north to Selçuk in the south, bringing the number of districts considered part of İzmir to thirty – two of these having been only administratively included in İzmir.
İzmir has more than 3000 years of recorded urban history and up to 8500 years of history as a human settlement since the Neolithic period. Set in an advantageous location at the head of a gulf in a deep indentation midway along the western Anatolian coast, the city has been one of the principal mercantile cities of the Mediterranean Sea for much of its history. Modern İzmir incorporates the nearby ancient cities of Ephesus, Pergamon and Klazomenai, centers of international tourism such as Kuşadası, Çeşme, Mordoğan and Foça; when the Ottomans took over İzmir in the 15th century, they did not inherit compelling historical memories, unlike the two other key points of the trade network, namely Istanbul and Aleppo. The emergence of İzmir as a major international port by the 17th century was a result of the attraction it exercised over foreigners, the city's European orientation. Politically, İzmir is considered the Republican People's Party. Izmir's port is Turkey's primary port for exports in terms of the freight handled and its free zone, a Turkish-U.
S. Joint-venture established in 1990, is the leader among the twenty in Turkey; the workforce, its rising class of young professionals, is concentrated either in the city or in its immediate vicinity, as either larger companies or SMEs, affirm their names with an wider global scale and intensity.İzmir hosted the Mediterranean Games in 1971 and the World University Games in 2005. In March 2008, İzmir submitted its bid to the BIE for hosting the Universal Expo 2015, but it was won by Milan, Italy; the modern name "İzmir" is the Turkish rendering of the original Greek name "Smyrna" and "Smyrne", since the city was founded by Greeks. In medieval times, Westerners used forms like Smire, Esmira, rendered as İzmir into Turkish written as ايزمير with the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. In ancient Anatolia, the name of a locality called Ti-smurna is mentioned in some of the Level II tablets from the Assyrian colony in Kültepe, with the prefix ti- identifying a proper name, although it is not established with certainty that this name refers to modern-day İzmir.
The region of İzmir was situated on the southern fringes of the Yortan culture in Anatolia's prehistory, knowledge of, entirely drawn from its cemeteries. In the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, it was in the western end of the extension of the still obscure Arzawa Kingdom, an offshoot and a dependency of the Hittites, who themselves spread their direct rule as far as the coast during their Great Kingdom; that the realm of the 13th century BC local Luwian ruler, depicted in the Kemalpaşa Karabel rock carving at a distance of only 50 km from İzmir was called the Kingdom of Myra may leave grounds for association with the city's name. The latest known rendering in Greek of the city's name is the Aeolic Greek Μύρρα Mýrrha, corresponding to the Ionian and Attic Σμύρνα or Σμύρνη, both descendants of a Proto-Greek form *Smúrnā; some would see in the city's name a reference to the name of an Amazon called Smyrna said to have seduced Theseus, leading him to name the city in her honor. Others link the name to the Myrrha commifera shrub, a plant producing the aromatic resin called myrrh, indig
Smyrna
Smyrna was a Greek city dating back to antiquity located at a central and strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Since 1930, the modern city located there has been known as İzmir, in Turkey, the Turkish rendering of the same name. Due to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defense and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence. Two sites of the ancient city are today within the boundaries of İzmir; the first site founded by indigenous peoples, rose to prominence during the Archaic Period as one of the principal ancient Greek settlements in western Anatolia. The second, whose foundation is associated with Alexander the Great, reached metropolitan proportions during the period of the Roman Empire. Most of the present-day remains of the ancient city date from the Roman era, the majority from after a 2nd-century AD earthquake. In practical terms, a distinction is made between these. Old Smyrna was the initial settlement founded around the 11th century BC, first as an Aeolian settlement, taken over and developed during the Archaic Period by the Ionians.
Smyrna proper was the new city which residents moved to as of the 4th century BC and whose foundation was inspired by Alexander the Great. Old Smyrna was located on a small peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus at the northeastern corner of the inner Gulf of İzmir, at the edge of a fertile plain and at the foot of Mount Yamanlar; this Anatolian settlement commanded the gulf. Today, the archeological site, named Bayraklı Höyüğü, is 700 metres inland, in the Tepekule neighbourhood of Bayraklı at 38°27′51″N 27°10′13″E. New Smyrna developed on the slopes of the Mount Pagos and alongside the coastal strait below where a small bay existed until the 18th century; the core of the late Hellenistic and early Roman Smyrna is preserved in the large area of İzmir Agora Open Air Museum at this site. Research is being pursued at the sites of both the new cities; this has been conducted since 1997 for Old Smyrna and since 2002 for the Classical Period city, in collaboration between the İzmir Archaeology Museum and the Metropolitan Municipality of İzmir.
For further information on etymology of the city's name, see İzmir#Names and etymology. Several explanations have been offered for its name. A Greek myth derived the name from an eponymous Amazon named "Σμύρνα", the name of a quarter of Ephesus; this is the basis of a city of Aeolis. In inscriptions and coins, the name was written as "Ζμύρνα", "Ζμυρναῖος", "of Smyrna"; the name Smyrna may have been taken from the ancient Greek word for myrrh, "smyrna", the chief export of the city in ancient times. The region was settled at least as of the beginning of the third millennium BC, or earlier, as the recent finds in Yeşilova Höyük suggests, it could have been a city of the autochthonous Leleges before the Greek colonists started to settle along the coast of Asia Minor as of the beginning of the first millennium BC. Throughout antiquity Smyrna was a leading city-state of Ionia, with influence over the Aegean shores and islands. Smyrna was among the cities that claimed Homer as a resident; the early Aeolian Greek settlers of Lesbos and Cyme, expanding eastwards, occupied the valley of Smyrna.
It was one of the confederacy of Aeolian city-states, marking the Aeolian frontier with the Ionian colonies. Strangers or refugees from the Ionian city of Colophon settled in the city. During an uprising in 688 BC, they took control of the city, making it the thirteenth of the Ionian city-states. Revised mythologies said. In 688 BC, the Ionian boxer Onomastus of Smyrna won the prize at Olympia, but the coup was then a recent event; the Colophonian conquest is mentioned by Mimnermus, who counts himself of Colophon and of Smyrna. The Aeolic form of the name was retained in the Attic dialect, the epithet "Aeolian Smyrna" remained current long after the conquest. Smyrna was located at the mouth of the small river Hermus and at the head of a deep arm of the sea that reached far inland; this enabled Greek trading ships to sail into the heart of Lydia, making the city part of an essential trade route between Anatolia and the Aegean. During the 7th century BC, Smyrna rose to splendor. One of the great trade routes which cross Anatolia descends the Hermus valley past Sardis, diverging from the valley, passes south of Mount Sipylus and crosses a low pass into the little valley where Smyrna lies between the mountains and the sea.
Miletus and Ephesus were situated at the sea end of the other great trade route across Anatolia. The Meles River, which flowed by Smyrna, was worshiped in the valley. A common and consistent tradition connects Homer with the valley of Smyrna and the banks of the Meles; the epithet Melesigenes was applied to him. The steady equable flow of the Meles, alike in summer and winter, its short course and ending near the city, are celebrated by Aristides and Himerius; the stream rises from abundant springs east of the city and flows into the southeast extremity of the gulf. The archaic city contained a temple of Athena from the 7th century BC; when the Mermnad kings raised the Lydian power and aggressiveness, Smyr
Media related to Édouard Balladur at Wikimedia Commons
