A diploma, a birth certificate or a power of attorney issued abroad is to be used before a Turkish institution; the institution asks for an apostille, and the holder goes to the nearest kaymakamlık, the district governor’s office, which places no apostille on a foreign document. The holder reasons that the document will be used in Türkiye, so Türkiye should apostille it; the rule says the opposite. This page explains why a foreign document gets no apostille from a Turkish authority, where the certificate comes from, and the one step that can be completed in Türkiye. Foreign-language documents are also answered briefly in the questions section of this site; here the refusal and its repair are covered.
No Turkish apostille on a foreign document
The district or provincial governor’s office places no apostille on a foreign document: under the Convention the apostille comes from an authority of the state that issued the document. Some holders take the document to a noter, a Turkish notary public, obtain a true-copy certification and present that certified copy at the district office; this time the clerk apostilles the notary’s signature only, while the institution keeps looking for an apostille from the document’s own country. The institution counts the apostille as missing; in fact there is an apostille in the file, but on the wrong signature. The key to reading the refusal is to ask which signature the certificate attests.
Article 1 ties the certificate to the issuing state
Article 1 of the Convention defines its scope as public documents executed in the territory of one contracting state and to be produced in another; article 3 leaves the certificate to the competent authority of the state where the document was executed. Under these two articles a Turkish authority certifies documents executed in Türkiye; the signature of a foreign university or a foreign registry office is outside that remit. Article 5 says the certificate attests the signature and the capacity of the person who signed. The Turkish authority is therefore without competence, not unwilling. The rule works in reverse too: a Turkish document cannot receive an apostille from an authority abroad.
The certificate comes from the document’s own country
The correct chain begins in the country that issued the document. If that country is a contracting state to the Apostille Convention, its competent authority issues the certificate; which authority that is appears on the HCCH country pages, and the country guide pages of this site show it from this site’s country data. A holder already in Türkiye obtains the apostille through a relative in that country or through an intermediary the country allows; whether that country’s authority accepts an application by post or online is read on its own page; this site did not verify it country by country. If the issuing country is outside the Convention, the two legalisation methods published by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs replace the apostille; that route is described on this site’s page about a foreign document presented in Türkiye without an apostille.
The only Turkish step: an apostille on the translation’s certification
The only apostille a Turkish authority can issue in a foreign document file is the apostille on a notarial act drawn up in Türkiye. The foreign document is translated into Turkish by a yeminli tercüman, a sworn translator whose oath is on record at a Turkish notary, and the notary certifies the translation; that certification is a Turkish document, and under article 199 of the Notaries Law its apostille is issued by the governor or district governor of any province. As the Onikişubat District Governor’s Office writes, that apostille attests the notarial certification and not the content of the translation; it says nothing about the authenticity of the foreign original. If the Turkish institution wants an apostille on the foreign document itself, the apostille on the translation does not fill that gap. The YÖK recognition file shows the distinction: the translation is certified by a Turkish notary or a Turkish mission, while the apostille on the original comes from the document’s country.
Which apostille the returned file lacks
When the file is returned, the first step is to establish on which document the institution wants an apostille. If it wants the apostille on the original, nothing can be done in Türkiye; the document goes back to its country, or a fresh copy is obtained and apostilled there. If the institution wants only a notarised Turkish translation and is not asking for an apostille on the original, the file is already complete and the refusal has another cause. If it wants both, the order is: apostille on the original from its own country first, then translation and notarial certification in Türkiye. Which Turkish institution asks for an apostille on which foreign document was not found in a single collected source in this site’s survey; civil registry, YÖK and residence procedures have their own pages, and for other institutions the institution’s own list is read.
Here the translation runs into Turkish
In this problem the translation is made into Turkish, not from it. It is made from the apostilled original; whether the foreign authority’s certificate is translated into Turkish as well is decided by the Turkish institution receiving it. The notarial certification is placed on the translation; an apostille on the translation serves use abroad, since the Convention covers documents produced in another contracting state; an official rule on how Turkish institutions treat a Turkish notary’s certification was not found in this site’s survey. An apostille on the translation becomes relevant only if the same file will travel on to a third country.