Turkestan

Turkestan, also spelled Turkistan, literally means "Land of the Turks" in Persian. It refers to an area in Central Asia between Siberia to the north and Tibet, India and Afghanistan to the south, the Caspian Sea to the west and Mongolia and the Gobi Desert to the east.

Of Persian origin (see -stan), the term "Turkestan" (ترکستان) has never referred to a single national state. Muslim geographers first used the word to describe the place of Turkic peoples.

Turkestan was used to describe any place where Turkic peoples lived.Anatolia during Ottoman rule was referred to as Turkestan by Ottoman writers.

On their way southward during the conquest of Central Asia in the course of the 19th century, the Russians took the city of Turkestan (in present-day Kazakhstan) in 1864. Mistaking its name for that of the entire region, they adopted the name of "Turkestan" for their new territory.

As of 2015^[update], the term labels a region in Central Asia which is inhabited mainly by Turkic peoples, but the regions also contained peoples who were not Turkic, such as the Tajiks, and excluded some who were. It includes present-day Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang (East Turkestan or Chinese Turkestan).Often, the Turkic regions of Afghanistan and Russia (Tatarstan and parts of Siberia) are included as well.

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