Turkey: Perspectives on Eurasian integration
Selim Koru & Timur Kaymaz
12 June 2016
It has become a cliché to speak about Turkey as a “bridge between East and West”. The country was indeed part of the historical Silk Road, and many of the country’s settlements were founded along the route, roughly 35 kilometres apart from each other – a day’s distance by caravan during the road’s heyday. But the Silk Road collapsed six centuries ago, and the 10 million shipping containers travelling from China to Europe are, today, almost all transported via maritime routes. The shift from a land route to a maritime route represented a huge change for East–West trade, and it may be changing again.
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