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Turkey is divided into 81 provinces, and unusually for an administrative map, every one of them carries a number you will see before you see the name. The number is the first thing on every Turkish licence plate, it is stencilled on municipal vehicles and printed on official signs, and for the first 67 provinces it is simply the alphabet. Learn where the names go and the plate in front of you stops being a two digit code and becomes a place. This page is the whole set, region by region, and the game asks you to put each name on the map.
A province is an il in Turkish, run by a vali appointed from Ankara, and in all but a handful of cases it is named after its own largest city. That is the first thing worth knowing about this map: Konya the province surrounds Konya the city, Trabzon the province surrounds Trabzon the city, and a road sign pointing at a city is usually pointing at the province of the same name.
The numbers are the second thing, and they are the reason this set is worth learning even if you never touch an administrative map again. Provinces 01 to 67 are in Turkish alphabetical order: Adana first, Zonguldak last, with everything in between falling where the alphabet puts it. Antalya is 07 because it starts with an A. Istanbul is 34 and Izmir 35 because I comes in the middle. Van is 65 and Yozgat 66 because they are near the end. So a plate you cannot place still tells you roughly how far into the alphabet its province sits, which on a map this well spread is a real narrowing.
Three of those early numbers look wrong under their modern names, and all three are renamings rather than exceptions: 33 was Icel before it became Mersin, 46 was Maras before it became Kahramanmaras, and 63 was Urfa before it became Sanliurfa. Each still sits where its old name put it in the alphabet.
Numbers 68 to 81 are the provinces created since, and they are in the order they were split off rather than in alphabetical order: Aksaray in 1989, Duzce in 1999 at the end of the list. A high number is a young province, and a young province is usually a small one carved out of a large neighbour.
The country calls itself Turkiye, which is what the United Nations has used since 2022, and Turkish spelling makes a real difference to some of these names. The game will show either form: switch on the local name in the start dialog and Sanliurfa becomes Şanlıurfa, Kahramanmaras becomes Kahramanmaraş and Agri becomes Ağrı. Turkish has an undotted ı and a dotted i as two separate letters, plus ş, ç, ğ, ö and ü, and the English spellings on this page are those letters flattened. If you are learning the names in order to read them off a sign, the Turkish setting is the one to practise in.
The shapes that catch people out are the small ones created in the 1990s. Yalova, Bartin, Karabuk, Kilis and Duzce are all young, all small, and each is wedged against a much larger neighbour whose name comes to mind first. The other trap is the names that begin alike and sit nowhere near each other. There are three Kir provinces: Kirklareli on the Bulgarian border in the far northwest, and Kirikkale and Kirsehir in the middle of Central Anatolia. There are three Kar ones: Karabuk on the western Black Sea, Karaman in the south of Central Anatolia, and Kars in the far northeast on the Armenian border. And Bitlis is in the east while Bilecik is in Marmara, which is about as far apart as this map goes.
Hatay is worth its own note. It is the province that hangs south along the Syrian coast, it was briefly a state of its own before joining Turkey in 1939, and its shape makes it one of the two or three provinces on this map you can hit without knowing the name at all.
Those are the seven geographical regions defined at Turkey's First Geography Congress in 1941, and they are how the country is taught, forecast and talked about: four named after the sea they face, three named for where they sit in Anatolia. They have no administrative power at all, which is worth saying out loud, because they look like a tier of government and are not one. Each can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog, which makes the Aegean an eight province drill and the Black Sea an evening.
Inside a region the provinces run in number order rather than alphabetically, which is why each list is alphabetical until it reaches the provinces created since 1989 and then stops being so. Ardahan and Igdir at the end of Eastern Anatolia, and Bayburt, Bartin, Karabuk and Duzce at the end of the Black Sea, are the young ones.
The name in brackets is the Turkish one, which is what the boundary sign and the weather forecast use, and what the game shows if you turn on local names. Where nothing is bracketed the two spellings are the same.
Turkey's largest city by a wide margin, and the only province on this map that a strait runs through. Everything west of the Bosphorus is in Europe and everything east of it is in Asia, which is why this province decides what continent the country is filed under. Plate 34, which is the single most common two digit code on any Turkish road.
The Mediterranean province in the middle of the south coast, and the clearest case of the alphabet doing the work: 07 is low, so the name starts near the front of the alphabet, and there is only one coastal A of that size. Antalya is also the province most travellers have actually been to, which makes it a good first anchor for the whole southern half of the map.
The last province Turkey created, split out of Bolu at the end of 1999 in the months after the two earthquakes that hit the region that year. It is the highest number on any plate, it is small, and it sits inland of the Black Sea coast between Sakarya and Bolu. Any plate in the high seventies is one of these recent creations, so the number tells you the province is small before you know which one it is.
81, and they cover the whole country with nothing left over. They are conventionally grouped into seven geographical regions, from Marmara in the northwest to Southeastern Anatolia on the Syrian and Iraqi border, and the game lets you drill one region at a time.
The first two digits of a Turkish plate are the province the vehicle is registered in. 34 is Istanbul, 06 is Ankara, 35 is Izmir. Provinces 01 to 67 were numbered in Turkish alphabetical order, so a low number means a province whose name starts near the front of the alphabet, and 68 to 81 were handed out in the order the provinces were created between 1989 and 1999.
Marmara, the Aegean, the Mediterranean, Central Anatolia, the Black Sea, Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia. They were defined at the First Geography Congress in 1941 and they are how Turkish geography is taught and how the weather is forecast, but they are not a level of government: the province is the top administrative unit and the regions sit above it only in description.
Kars and Karaman, which sound alike and sit at opposite ends of the country. Bitlis in the east and Bilecik in the northwest. Aydin on the Aegean coast and Adiyaman in the southeast. And the small provinces created in the 1990s, Yalova, Duzce, Bartin, Karabuk and Kilis, which are easy to miss entirely because a bigger neighbour comes to mind first.
They are the main way to pin a Turkish location. Every plate carries its province code, road signs name the province you are entering, and official signage repeats it, so a single passing car often narrows the country to one province. That only helps if you know where the province is, which is what this trainer drills.
Both refer to the same country. Turkiye, written Türkiye, is the Turkish name and the one the United Nations has used since 2022. Turkey is still the common English form and the one most people search for, so this page uses it, and the province names are offered in both an English spelling and the Turkish one.
More administrative maps on the same side of the world: Russia Federal Subjects, India States and Thailand Provinces. For the country's European neighbours, try Poland Voivodeships and Spain Provinces.
