Turkey is not western. There is no arguing that. The western looking Turkish are mostly descendants of Greeks or people from the Balkans that were captured during the Ottoman empire and became Janissaries (kids that were stolen from their families and sent to Turkey to become soldiers) or people who were converted to Islam to avoid taxes and have equal treatment to the Turkish in the Ottoman empire. They are also descendants of the people who used to live in the Aegean coast during the Byzantine Empire.
The claim that Greeks and Turkish lived peacefully in the empire is wrong. People were not open minded back then and just the fact that they had different religion was enough to make them hate each other.
There are tons of old documents in Crete about people in Rethymno for example who were forced to convert to Islam and later in their wills they would leave all their money and land to, guess what, the Orthodox church, not to the Muslims. The same applies in other parts of Greece too.
Why do you think the Greek Orthodox Church is so rich and powerful nowadays? The Church has money and land people can't even begin to imagine. This is because Greeks would donate their fortunes to the Church to avoid losing it to the Turkish or to avoid paying heavy taxes.
Today everyone pays taxes too but no one considers donating their house and land to the Church to avoid the taxes. If someone reaches a point that he has no choice but to do such a thing it means that the taxes are extremely heavy. So please I don't want to read how kind the Turkish were to the Greeks and that they were treated like kings...
This is false and insulting to a nation that struggled for almost 400years.
If Greeks were treated like Turkish they wouldn't donate their lands and money to the church.
If Greeks were treated like kings they wouldn't try to free themselves at 1821.
If Greeks were loved by the Turks, Greek women wouldn't commit suicide to avoid getting raped, or to avoid giving birth to Turkish kids after being raped.
The mixture between Turks and Greeks, in Greek lands was minimal. It mostly happened in the current Turkish territories.
It is the Turkish who look like Greeks, the so called western-looking Turkish, and not the Greeks who look like Turkish.
Please stop "buying" the Skopjan propaganda that wants the modern Greeks mixed with Turks so that they can claim the Great Alexander as Skopjan, this is another topic and I don't want to talk about it in this thread.
Modern Turkey is a mixture of Asians with some Europeans. There are Turkish who look Mongoloid, some who look like Europeans and many who look mixed. Overall though Turkey is not Western. It is a nation where Islam is more important than laws, ruled by the army, without respect to women and with zero respect to other religions and minorities.