At a recent meeting with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, the head of the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party, Devlet Bahceli, presented the Turkish President with a map of the so-called Turkic world. The Turkic world, according to Bahcheli, includes a significant part of the territory of Russia - Crimea, Kuban, Rostov region and the republics of the North Caucasus, Eastern Siberia. The Balkans, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China and part of the territories of Mongolia and Iran also got there.

It is important to note that Erdogan himself did not give any comment to the photo, did not say or did anything. That is, he did not directly express his assessment of what is depicted on the map, nor did he make it clear how he himself relates to this, leaving the opportunity to understand this issue to experts and political scientists. Perhaps because he himself has not yet formed his attitude to this topic and wants to understand it. Well, let's try and we will do it.

The Turkic world is indeed very large.

But its main part is located in Russia, a significant part - on the territory of the post-Soviet space, which is a zone of strategic interests of Russia and part of a single Eurasian civilization, in the center of which lies the Eurasian Heartland, that is, historical Russia with its thousand-year history.

So, if you draw a map of the Eurasian civilization, one of the constituent parts of which are the Turks, then Turkey will also get there as a small fragment of it.

And you can also draw a map of the Russian world, where, in addition to the historical Greater Russia during the heyday of the Romanov empire, include all states and spaces that the Russians had a historical, cultural, civilizational, linguistic or even military influence, including Africa, Latin America and a significant part Asia.

Or, for example, to depict a map of the Slavic world, a significant part of which is again Russia;

or the map of the influence of Greek civilization, adopted by the Russians from Byzantium, the center of the Eastern Christian world, and Turkey will also fall on this map almost entirely.

That is, you can draw a lot of such cards.

Another question is what is behind them and how they can be justified.

Actually, the space of the Turkic world inhabited by Turkic peoples, the descendants of the ancient Turkic nomadic tribes, has absolutely nothing to do with the current Turkish Republic - a small fragment of the Ottoman Empire that collapsed as a result of the First World War.

But even the Ottoman Empire was chronologically the most recent imperial state in which the Turks played a great influence.

The Turks themselves, as a linguistic and ethnic group, according to Gumilev, appeared at the beginning of the 1st millennium in Altai and on the territory of Dzungaria, which is very far from present-day Turkey.

One of the versions traces the origin of the Turks to the Huns.

The Turks played a decisive role in the formation of the Eurasian civilization together with the Slavs, Finno-Ugrians and other peoples of Eurasia, created many states and empires, including the Blue Horde, their descendants settled throughout the Eurasian continent.

But all this absolutely does not give any advantages or special rights or grounds for any claims of the current Turkish Republic, chronologically - the very last in the history of the Turkic state, neither in terms of the primary source of origin of the Turks, nor in terms of preserving the Turkic culture and tradition.

The Republic of Turkey is a secular state, which, of course, is not subject to any doubts with the Turkic world, has a common root in the name of the state.

That is, in the name of the Turkish political nation - the entire set of citizens of the Republic of Turkey, regardless of their origin (Turks) - with the historical name of a whole group of peoples and ethnic groups (Turks).

Turkish radical nationalists play on this consonance of the words "Turks" and "Turks", considering such an artificial identification of completely different terms a sufficient justification for Turkish expansion beyond the borders of the current Turkish Republic.

Such expansionist manners of Turkish nationalists put Erdogan in an extremely uncomfortable position, especially considering that the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China falls into the same space of claims of Turkish nationalists. In fact, China as an adversary is the last thing Erdogan would like to deal with. Also, he would not at all want to quarrel with today's Russia. Moreover, Russia and China are the second and third armies in the world ranking of the armed forces. The brave guy, the leader of the National Movement Party of Turkey, Devlet Bahceli, apparently has a different opinion on this matter.

By and large, Turkish nationalists simply frame Erdogan with such clumsy gestures, forcing him to either remain silent, without commenting on anything, which looks extremely ambiguous and is blamed in the Turkish nationalist environment, or make excuses, which will look unattractive to the whole world. Or to show solidarity with such extremely nationalistic attacks - then this endangers not only Erdogan himself (given that Turkey is ideologically heterogeneous), but the entire Turkish state (taking into account the possible reaction of Turkey's neighbors).

There are at least three vectors in the current political elites of Turkey: this is the Atlanticist vector, oriented towards the USA and the West;

this is the Eurasian vector of orientation towards Russia and participation in Eurasian initiatives;

and this is a kind of nationalist vector that (situationally) either challenges the first two, or solidifies with one or the other, depending on the current situation, but always to the detriment of Turkish interests, each time only weakening the positions of both Turkey and Erdogan on the world stage.

In addition, there are also Gulenist networks (supporters of the Turkish Islamist preacher Fethullah Gulen, who is either alive or dead).

And then there are radical Islamists imported into Turkey from the outside, with their own agenda, and a host of smaller ideological and political trends that are tearing Turkey to shreds.

In these conditions, the main concern of the Turkish leader should be the preservation of national unity and integrity, the preservation of at least minimal stability and stability of the current Turkish state - the nation. And not a swing to those spaces that never, either historically or civilizationally, had nothing to do with the Ottoman Empire, let alone today's Turkey. In the current conditions of internal political fragmentation and ideological disunity in Turkey, the discussion of mythological projects such as the "neo-Ottoman empire" or the "Turkic world" is not only historically unfounded, but also politically extremely dangerous.

And yet the most fantastic is the project of the so-called Great Turan, to which the extreme Turkish nationalists also appeal, interpreting the concept of Turan completely wrong, due to some kind of conceptual and semantic substitution.

Historically, Turan is the space for the birth of nomadic Indo-European peoples, whose descendants include many European peoples, and Russians, and Indians, and Tajiks, and Armenians (what a horror for Turkish nationalists - this is also an ancient Indo-European people).

But these are only descendants who have an extremely indirect relation to Turan.

More or less directly related to the nomadic tribes of Turan are only very few of the peoples that have survived to this day: the descendants of the Sarmatians, the Ossetians, individual Pashtun nomadic tribes, as well as the Kalash of Pakistan and Afghanistan. But even this is only a conditional ethnographic reconstruction. The current mixed (in terms of origin) population of the Republic of Turkey, the Turkish political nation itself, if it had any ethnic inclusions of Turanian nomadic tribes, as a whole, is extremely far from this archaeological phenomenon in its essence.

The only source that supporters of at least some kind of belonging of present-day Turkey to Great Turan can refer to is the treatises of Suhrawardi or "Shahnameh" by Firdousi, where Turan is rather conventionally called the space of nomadic tribes north of Iran - the space of a sedentary civilization exposed to the raids of nomads.

Hence, one gets the feeling that Turan is somehow connected with present-day Turkey, but this is incorrect neither etymologically nor historically.

That is, the concept of the Great Turan, with its center certainly in Turkey, is a kind of mythological fit for a purely political project, which, moreover, has its origins outside Turkey and is aimed at inciting Turkey's confrontation primarily with Russia and Iran.

Who is interested in this?

The answer is obvious.

So if the card slipped to Erdogan represents a kind of swing for the future, then this does not mean at all that this swing will turn in favor of Turkey.

You have to be more careful with such "swings", for the results will obviously not be rubbed in Turkey, but far overseas.

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.