No record of an appointment requirement was found in this site’s survey: the service standards of the Ankara Governor’s Office and the Çankaya District Governor’s Office give the processing time in minutes and contain no appointment line. The Legalisation Unit of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs handles no apostilles; it legalises documents for countries outside the Convention. In e-Apostil there is no desk at all; the application is made online.
Ten minutes per document at the governor’s offices
The service standard table of the Legal Affairs Branch of the Ankara Governor’s Office (the valilik, the provincial governor’s office) lists what is required for an apostille and how long it takes: one document is certified in about ten minutes. The table of the Çankaya District Governor’s Office (a kaymakamlık) gives the same ten minutes. The apostille pages of the Onikişubat and Zile district offices do not mention appointments either. This does not prove that no district anywhere uses appointments; it shows only that none of the official pages surveyed states such a condition. A district office may organise its counter according to its workload, so checking the office’s page or telephoning before the visit saves time. Day-to-day availability is not published on this site.
The Foreign Ministry desk is not an apostille desk
The Legalisation Unit serves documents going to countries outside the Convention. An apostilled document is not brought here; the Ministry does not legalise a document that already bears an apostille. Someone looking for an apostille is therefore in the wrong place at the Unit, whatever its own arrangements are; for those arrangements, the Legalisation Unit’s own page is the reference.
No counter at all in the electronic system
In e-Apostil, the official Turkish electronic apostille system, the application is made after logging in to e-Devlet, the Turkish e-government portal; the document is produced electronically and downloaded from the same site. According to the FAQ, the time to completion depends on the type of document and on the workload of the competent authority; the system gives no number of days. The system serves six document types only; its scope is explained on a separate page of this site. For a document outside that scope, the counter is the only route.
The judicial commission: no official page found
The application procedure, appointment arrangements and processing time of the judicial commissions, the adli yargı adalet komisyonu başkanlığı at courthouses that apostille the originals of judicial documents, were not researched in this site’s survey; no official page was found. For court judgments and criminal record extracts the e-Apostil route removes that uncertainty, since the application reaches the commission electronically; the press release of the Turkish Ministry of Justice says that people living abroad no longer have to travel to Türkiye to apply in person to a commission for these two documents.
The steps that take the time come before the counter
If the apostille counter works in minutes, the total time is set by the steps before it: obtaining the document from the issuing body, the translation and the notarial certification. The translation is certified at the notary office where the yeminli tercüman (a sworn translator, whose oath is recorded at a Turkish notary) has their oath on file; since the rule tying the apostille to the notary’s district was removed in 2024, the apostille counter can be in any province or district. A translation office plans the translation and the notary step; the document holder or a person they have authorised goes to the apostille counter. No appointment for an apostille counter is taken on this site, and none can be.