Hi, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. This episode is going out on Thanksgiving Day 2018. You're in the United States. You're probably eating enough food for five people right now. If you're outside the United States, I'm almost positive you have familiarity with the American holiday of Thanksgiving through movies and everything else. And you've at least seen the stereotypical image of people crowding around the table to eat an enormous amount of turkey.

Something I want to touch on in this episode isn't the origins of Thanksgiving, which are

somewhat well understood, even though they can also be very well misunderstood.

But I want to look at another aspect of Thanksgiving, and that has to do with the bird

itself.

A turkey has the same name as a country of Turkey. Is that a coincidence? It's not a coincidence. There's a similar origin for the name of these two,

but the common origin that these two have isn't just a small historical trivia fact, but it's actually a vast story about global

trade and a new age of human connection that began 500 years ago. That's what this podcast

episode is going to be about. The idea for this episode, the commonality between the name of

the bird and the country, came from Chris Grayton, who is one of the hosts of the Ottoman history podcast.

He also explored this issue on an episode several years ago.

Chris looked more at this question from the perspective of the Colombian exchange and the history of the Ottoman Empire.

I'm going to look at this more from the vantage point of the bird itself.

So this connection between Turkey the Bird and Turkey the country tells us a huge story about

the age of discovery that, among many other things, brought the pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620.

And it also tells us about how confused people in the old world were about people in the new

world when they discover the original inhabitants there.

And one of the reasons that we call a turkey, a turkey, the bird, is because even though indigenous Americans had little to do with the old world, this didn't prevent people in the old world associating people and things in the new world with the Middle East, India, and elsewhere.

So first off, let's begin with terminology.

So the word Turkey, which came first?

The bird or the country?

Well, the country came first, and more specifically, the people who gave the country

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