Join Date: May 2012
Posts: 14,200
Istanbul is probably my favorite city on Earth. I love massive, chaotic cities with tons to do/see and Istanbul fits the bull. Turkey is indeed incredible value ATM.
It used to be super easy to get residency in Turkey, even as a tourist. Basically all you had to do was sign a 1-year lease, get a tax #, and health insurance then fill out an application online and they gave you an appointment. There were lots of people staying multiple years like this.
However, that seemed to change once the Russian invasion happened. Turkey is already seeing lots of Syrian refugees, and now there are lots of Russians/Ukrainians, so they severely reduced the amount of new residence visas they were granting.
We applied back in April, had a year contract, and everything else, but were denied. We're hoping this goes back to the way it was before, but for now we're just waiting.
Apparently, you can also easily get residency if you buy a property valued over $75k USD. It used to be that any property would do, no matter the value, but again, things got stricter this year.
We liked it so much, that we might even do the student visa route, but for now, we're locked into Georgia until April, so we'll see how things look at that time.
