Already a hosteler to millions of Syrians, Turkey appears as a haven seat amid Europe’s war.
Turkey, Russia’s southern neighbor across the Black Sea, for more than a hundred years has hosted waves of refugees and exiles in Istanbul, Turkey.
Circassians fled to the Ottoman Empire from genocide in the 19th century by tsarist Russia.
An estimated 200,000 took shelter in the early 1920s in Istanbul from the Russian Civil War by a fifth, increasing the city’s population. They comprised the renowned author Vladimir Nabokov.
However, with the majority resettling in Paris few stayed in London and New York. The 1990s and 2000s saw refugees more recently arrive from war-torn Chechnya.
In Ukraine, as Moscow continues its military campaign to Turkey, many anti-war Russians have flocked.
And while the majority of Ukrainian refugees have fled in the country to neighboring EU countries, a significant number are also settling.
The interior ministry announced that upwards of 20,000 Ukrainian refugees on March 7 had arrived, though that figure is likely to have increased substantially since then; in the country.
In a crowded passport queue on the evening of March 14, at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport, where hundreds of people; waited, it appeared as if more than half of those for about half an hour to pass through, in line held Ukrainian passports.
Kristina, who is 36, left Kyiv with her two sons on March 5, aged three and 16, and her mother, where they boarded a bus to Istanbul by car to the Ukrainian city of Khmelnytskyi that passed through Romania and Bulgaria.
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