Is Türkiye safe? Four questions, four answers

Nobody asks this question in a first meeting. It arrives in the third or fourth conversation, usually from the spouse rather than the investor, usually phrased carefully: we are not worried exactly, but…

It deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one. What follows separates the four distinct things people mean when they ask whether Türkiye is safe — personal security, earthquakes, political stability and currency — because they are genuinely different questions with genuinely different answers, and bundling them produces either false comfort or false alarm.

What people actually mean

When a Gulf family asks, they usually mean schools and street safety. When an Indian or Chinese client asks, they usually mean political predictability. When an American or British client asks, they usually mean earthquakes. When someone from a high-inflation economy asks, they mean the lira — and they are often the best-informed of the four, because they have seen it before at home.

We will take them in that order.

1. Personal security and daily life

Istanbul is a city of roughly sixteen million people. Like any city of that size it has districts where a foreign family would comfortably raise children and districts where they would not, and the difference is not subtle once you know the map. The central districts where our clients buy — the residential belt on the European side and the established neighbourhoods on the Asian side — are, in ordinary daily terms, safe. Women walk alone at night. Children take the metro. Restaurants are full past midnight.

Violent crime rates in Türkiye are low by the standards of most large economies, and this is not a marketing claim — it is consistent across sources and it matches what residents experience. Petty theft in tourist areas is the realistic risk, and it is the same realistic risk as Rome or Barcelona.

The honest caveats: traffic is genuinely dangerous and worse than most Western European countries; consumer protection and building standards vary enormously between a well-run development and a cheap one; and if you do not speak Turkish, you are more dependent on the people advising you than you would be at home. That last point is not a security issue exactly, but it is the one that costs foreigners money.

2. Earthquakes, which is the serious one

This is the risk we treat most seriously, and the one where the marketing in this industry is at its worst.

Türkiye sits on major fault systems. Istanbul faces a well-documented seismic risk from the North Anatolian fault running through the Sea of Marmara. This is not speculative and it is not alarmist to say so — it is the settled view of Turkish and international seismologists, and it is why the Turkish state runs one of the largest urban transformation programmes in the world.

What follows from that, for a buyer, is specific rather than general:

• The building matters far more than the city. Structural failure in Turkish earthquakes has overwhelmingly been concentrated in older stock built before the modern seismic codes and in newer stock built badly. A well-engineered building on competent ground is a different proposition from a 1980s block on soft soil three streets away.
• Construction date is the first filter, not the last. The regulations tightened significantly after 1999 and again in 2018. Age tells you which code applied. It does not tell you whether the code was followed.
• Ground conditions vary street by street. Two buildings of the same age and quality on different soil behave very differently.
• DASK is compulsory and it is not enough. The state earthquake insurance scheme is mandatory for a title transfer and its cover is capped well below the value of the properties our clients buy. Supplementary private cover is a separate purchase and most foreign buyers do not know to ask for it.

3. Political stability

We are a Turkish law firm writing about our own country on our own website, so weigh this accordingly — but the useful thing we can offer is precision about what actually affects a foreign owner, rather than an opinion about Turkish politics.

Türkiye is a competitive electoral democracy with contested elections, an active opposition and a press that argues loudly with itself. It is also a country with real institutional tensions, periodic constitutional argument, and a policy environment that has changed direction more than once in the last decade. Both of those statements are true and international observers disagree about how to weigh them. If you want a considered assessment of Turkish democratic institutions, read a range of sources rather than a law firm's website.

What we can tell you precisely is what has and has not changed for foreign owners:

• Foreign property ownership rights have not been curtailed. Foreigners have owned Turkish property throughout, title is registered in the national Land Registry, and it is defensible in court like any other title.
• The citizenship programme's terms have changed, more than once. The threshold moved from USD 1,000,000 to 250,000 and then to 400,000. The Eurobond route closed in January 2022. Procedural requirements have tightened. Anyone selling you a programme as immutable is misleading you — and this is an argument for acting on current rules rather than waiting for better ones.
• Tax policy moves, and recently it moved favourably. Law No. 7582 and the twenty-year foreign income exemption are a deliberate policy choice to attract exactly the people reading this. Policy that moves in your favour is still policy that moves.
• Citizenship once granted is permanent. It does not lapse, it is not conditional on continuing to hold the investment beyond three years, and it passes to your descendants. This is the structural reason the Turkish programme survives political argument better than residence-based alternatives.

4. The currency

The lira has lost a great deal of value against the dollar and euro over the past decade, and inflation has been high for a sustained period. This is the plainest fact in this article and there is no way to present it as an advantage.

What it means depends entirely on what you are doing:

Your position	What lira weakness does
Buying property in dollars, measuring in dollars	Your entry price is set in dollars and the citizenship threshold is a dollar figure. Lira movement affects the local price level, not your dollar commitment.
Receiving rent in lira, spending in dollars	This is where the damage occurs. Nominal rent rises; its dollar value may not keep pace. Any yield figure quoted to you without a currency basis is meaningless.
Living in Türkiye on foreign income	Structurally favourable, and the reason the 20-year exemption is attractive to remote earners.
Holding lira deposits	Nominal interest rates have been high. What that leaves you in dollars depends entirely on the exchange rate over the same period, and that is the question to ask.

The practical rule: decide which currency you measure your wealth in, and make everyone who quotes you a number quote it in that currency. Most disappointment in this market comes from people who accepted a lira figure and mentally converted it at today's rate for the next five years.

When we tell people the answer is no

We say this a few times a year, and it is worth writing down.

If short-notice European travel is the objective, this is the wrong programme — the Turkish passport does not give Schengen access. If you cannot absorb currency volatility on the capital you are committing, choose a route that returns your principal rather than one exposed to a market. If you want a home you will live in but you have never spent time in Türkiye, come and stay for a month before you buy anything. And if the political environment of the country issuing your second passport is something you want to be certain about for the next twenty years, no honest lawyer anywhere can promise you that, in any jurisdiction.

If there is a specific concern behind your question — a building you have been shown, a district you have been offered, a currency exposure you are unsure about — put it to us directly. You may also want to read the district guide and what we check before you pay a deposit.