Turkish identity card
Turkish Identity Card
The Republic of Turkey Identity Card (Turkish: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Kimlik Kartı) is mandatory for all Turkish citizens from birth. The Turkish police are authorized to request identification at any time, and failure to comply may result in a fine. The identity card also serves as a travel document for Turkish citizens entering certain countries and regions without a passport. It is currently accepted for entry into Northern Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina (planned), Georgia (since 2011), Moldova (since 2019), Ukraine (since 2017, if arriving directly from Turkey), Azerbaijan (since 1 April 2021, if arriving directly from Turkey), and Serbia instead of a passport.
History
Identity cards, theoretically obligatory for all citizens, male and female, existed already in the late Ottoman Empire. They were known in Turkish as nüfus tezkeresi. To the Slavic subjects of the Ottoman state they were known colloquially as nofuz (Bulgarian: нофуз).
ID cards (1927-1991)
Turkey issued ID cards (Turkish: Nüfus Hüviyet Cüzdanı) with the 1927 census in Ottoman Arabic letters. With Turkey's change to Latin script, ID cards were changed to Latin in 1928. Surnames were added after 1934, with the Surname Law.
“Turkish identity card” enters the record as turkish Identity Card. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Turkish, identity and card can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Turkish identity card” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Turkish, identity and card provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3866793. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2019, 2017 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Turkish identity card” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.