Meet the new Turk: Steve Kictschmer

This is the last name we saw on our new TVs warranty paperwork. For non Turkish speakers: the first three letters of this last name mean “butt” in Turkish. Well, here is the story of Steve and his acquisition of Turkish citizenship. We applied for Turkish citizenship in April in Washington DC. We were told that it will take anywhere from 6 weeks to 9 months for it to be approved and finalized. So we did it and made a mental note to check on it in October – November time frame.
Middle of September. I had to get some paperwork done for customs people in order to receive our household goods in Istanbul (another major blog entry coming soon) and one of the paperwork is called “vukuatli nufus kagidi” which is like a transaction history of your life. It registers marriage, birth and death. You go to a citizen records office that you are registered and get this print out. I was reviewing it because I was amazed by the fact that all three children who were born in USA were actually recognized by this system. All their information was there, their full names, birthdates and place, their Turkish ID number and when this transaction was registered there etc. All kids were registered within 3 months of their birth in this citizen records office in Istanbul. Then I saw next to Steve’s name a Turkish ID number and a registration date of September 2008. As I was trying to digest why he was registered so late (we got married in 2000) something in my brain put it all together, wow a Turkish ID number means he is Turkish now. So we all started to laugh and congratulate him on his new achievement in life and immediately started to speculate when he would be arrested by the military officers for not serving his mandatory military service term.
The next day I called the citizen records office to understand what we need to bring to get his Turkish ID card. And of course they were soo helpful; first thing they asked was the residence permit (which we don’t have). I explained that we are in the process of relocating from US to Turkey and therefore we do not have one yet. Then they asked for a letter from the Interior Ministery confirming his citizenhip which we did not have of course so I had to hang up the phone. We called Turkish embassy in DC to see if they heard anything about Steve’s citizenship application and they said it did not come through yet. So we were the only ones in this country who was aware of this phenomenon and I wasn’t sure how to proceed from there. So we shrugged our shoulders and decided to just wait.
Fast forward a month. Steve has a business meeting in Russia and he has to get a visa. But he is an American who happens to be in Istanbul - a potential problem. Quickly we were told that he either has to be Turkish or has to have a resident permit to obtain a visa through the Russian Consulate in Istanbul. Or he has to wait 10 business days so Russia can run a background check on him. Of course as seasoned procrastinators we did not have enough time, so we decided to just go to the citizen records office and give it a chance to get Steve’s Turkish ID.

I explained the situation to the manager - I told him how we saw on my transaction record that Steve was awarded the citizenship but we do not have an official letter or anything. I also told him about the urgency of this upcoming Russia trip and somehow that story did the trick. The officer seemed to be rather pleased that as an American Steve has to wait longer than Turkish citizens to get the visa. So within 45 minutes we were holding Steve’s new national ID card!! And they only wanted two passport pictures. (Need to point out one more reason to move to Turkey: 8 passport pictures – done in 10 minutes for ONLY 8 DOLLARS!!!)

And so here is the end of our road to citizenship, we are still taking bets on when Steve will be arrested for not doing his mandatory military service. I am hoping that this will not be a subject for a future blog entry.

Live from Istanbul, this is Serra’s infrequent blog entry :)