The Turkish hamster has the largest distributional area in the genus Mesocricetus. It occurs in Anatolia, Transcaucasia (Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan; Šidlovskij 1967), SE Daghestan (Russian Federation) (Gromov and Erbaeva 1995, Pavlinov et al., 2002). and northwest Iran (Qazvin in the east, Lurestan in the south; Lay, 1967). Reports for north Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and north Israel (Musser and Carleton, 2005) are erroneous (Shehab et al. 2004). The species is found from sea level to 2,600 m, however, the primary range is above 1,000-2,200 m.