Why does Turkey get earthquakes?

Well i would love to answer this because i am turkish myself even though i was born and live in London. So there was an earthquake in turkey on 1999 (when i was born) it killed 17000 people and it only took 37 seconds. did you know that it left half a million people homeless! i am sorry to say i havent really got to find out a lot about why there was an earthquake, i am not very good at earthquakes but all i know is that at the time, if the houses were made stronger to earthquakes then it would have been much better but now luckily the buildings and houses are mainly strong against earthquakes :) ellie