Editor’s Note: This post is intended for Americans marrying Turkish citizens in a belediye nikah salonu (municipal wedding hall) in Istanbul. For other nationalities, other cities in Turkey, or if you want your wedding officiated offsite, kolay gelsin, I have little experience, but if you ask in the comments, I will try to help. -EM
Congratulations! You are going to say your “evets”, and maybe dance the halay and pick up a few gold coins. It’s May and wedding season, so I thought it would be a good time to help those in need with the rather the bureaucratic process of getting married in Istanbul.
Just after our wedding ceremony at the Maltepe Evlendirme Dairesi (municipal wedding hall).
If you are reading this, you may know that there is some running around to do, and maybe you’ve asked a friend or coworker who is married to a Turk, but you still aren’t totally sure how to go about it.
The first step is to make a notarial appointment at the Istanbul U.S. Consulate located in Istinye on the European side, up the Bosphorus in the Sariyer district (ways to get there).
It’s the first step because the appointment slots fill up fast (there are none available Friday afternoon). Wait periods are long: they can range from two weeks to well over a month. At the time of writing, the appointments for May were fully booked, and the time slots for June hadn’t been made available. Fill out the PDF affidavit at the consular site, print it and bring it.
At the consulate, you will wait anywhere for 5 minutes to an hour (you have to leave your cell phone, so bring a book). You will say an oath swearing that you are not married in the States. The process requires a passport, the PDF form, and $50 cash.
After that, take the affidavit to the valilik (mayor’s office) in Cağoğlu near Sultanahmet. You will get an apostille stamp on the second floor of this sad, dark, bureaucratic building. It’s free.
Meanwhile, you or your Turkish spouse-to-be will arrange to have some medical tests. Turkish citizens just get an evlilik testi. For the American’s, it’s not so simple. American men need to get tested for akdeniz anemesi, or Mediterranean anemia (at least I was asked for that, not everyone is). I had it done at a private medical test lab on Bahariye Caddesi in Kadikoy. Any private lab offering blood tests should be able to do it. It was about 100 TL and took about a week to get the results back. Some clinics, such as the Rana Bese Saglik Polikligi in Kadikoy, can do it all in one shot for at least 200 TL. Call for confirmation.
For regular blood tests, I went to a free clinic run by the Maltepe Belediyesi (municipality). They take chest x-rays (also required), and simple blood tests.
We aimed to save money, so we ran around more. It’s worth paying more to get it all done in one go if you can. Have your Turkish significant other call around to different hospitals and clinics if you are unsure.
After receiving the blood test results, the Mediterranean anemia results, the x-ray image, and making a bunch of passport-sized photos, we went to my spouses family’s local aile hekimi (family doctor). These are located in the saglik ocağı (health clinic) where your future Turkish spouse maintains residency. These neighborhood doctors are determined by the government according to official residence. This site can help your Turkish partner locate his/her family doctor if it’s not known. You can make an appointment over the phone (recommended) or drop in.
After this, you take the health report form, affidavit from the consulate, passport, residency permit, plus the administrative fees and passport-sized photos (ranging from 100 TL to more than 700, depending on the size of the hall rented and the day of the week/time) to the belediye nikah salonu (municipal wedding hall) where your Turkish spouse lives.
NOTE: If you want to get married outside of your Turkish spouse’s ilçe (district) of residence, you take all the above forms to the your local evlendirme dairesi. They give a special form giving permission to marry outside the district, and you take that plus the administrative fees to the district where you want to tie the knot. Both bride and groom must be present at both evlendirme daireleri to get the forms.
For example, my friend Damla and her husband wanted to get married in Maltepe, but there residences were Kartal and Fatih districts, respectively. So they both submitted their required documents to Kartal’s marriage hall, then took the special form to Maltepe and paid their fee.
Some municipalities ask for a birth certificate (Kadıköy did, Maltepe, where we got married, did not), so it’s good to have this as well. Some may ask for a notarized translation of your passport. I got this and wasted 100 TL, neither Kadıköy nor Maltepe required it.
The tricky thing for us was the timing of the whole procedure. Because we wanted to get married at a large marriage hall on a summer weekend, we had to make an appointment at least a few months in advance, but appointments can only be made a maximum of six months in advance.
So you need to start the process early enough that all the documents in order to give yourself a few months time to snap up a desired summer weekend time. However, all marriage documents are only valid 6 months maximum. So there is a time window. Compounding this is the fact that Ramadan falls smack in the middle of summer in this decade, and nearly all Turkish families wouldn’t prefer attending marriages during Ramadan — especially if booze will be involved in the düğün (reception).
Also, check with the belediye (municipality) where you plan to get married to see how far in advance you can reserve a ceremony date. Most are 6 months, but could be less, which could make your window of time to get all the documents ready even shorter.
(Of course, if you wouldn’t mind going in and signing the papers at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, then this doesn’t apply to you.)
For example, if you are planning to get married on a Saturday in August — and you need to tell Aunt Greta back home the exact date — given the wait times at the consulate, it would be best to get an appointment at the consulate for February or March, meaning making that appointment in January.
Good luck!
PS: The Turkey Travel Planner has some nice general advice on what to do.