Residence Permit

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I spaced out entirely that this year was a leap year. It didn’t really make a big difference though; I gained an extra day, but at the same time basically lost it too. I entered Turkey with a Student Visa - declaring my intention to come to Turkey to study. As part of the deal, I needed to apply for a residence permit within 30 days of my arrival in Turkey. Time was ticking away, but this last week we received the necessary Turkish forms needed to apply for the permit, so Friday a group of us decided to go to Istanbul’s central police station to apply.

I woke up shortly after 6 to check my phone to see when we were going to leave (I was supposed to get a text message that night.) Unfortunately, my phone gets abysmal reception when in the dorm (or really anywhere else), and I missed the text, so my friends came by at 6:20 to see if I was ready, I wasn’t, but threw on some jeans and grabbed my forms and ran out the door to catch the 6:30 bus.

There were originally five people in our group, one Turk from the exchange commission and four students, including myself. On the bus, we met up with two other students going to apply, so our group began to swell. At Taksim, we caught another bus, and by 8:00 we were at the police station starting the process. We picked up three more students at the police station as we began to submit forms. It was a slow process, as our Turkish friend submitted all of our forms in a single stack (to make it simple for him; do everything in one place rather than have to run back and forth for each student that had a question), but we were done submitting everything by 10:00, at which point we were told that our forms needed to be processed, and that it should take about two hours. This was because our papers were processed as a group.

Instead of sitting around and waiting in the Police station, we were allowed to leave, Hakan, our Turkish friend decided to lead us to Fatih Mosque. Sadly, I didn’t bring my camera (I felt the pictorial documentation of applying for a residence permit was unnecessary. One student did, and it was confiscated by the police, so it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

The Fatih Mosque was very impressive, and I plan to go back with my camera to document it. It was built to honor Mehmed II, who captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire. There is a huge mosque, surrounded by areas to sit. There is also a small masouleum to house Mehmed’s remains. As Turkey is secular, non-Muslims are welcome to enter Mosques (provided there is no worship ceremony being held), and are even allowed to take pictures. So, Hakan led us inside. It was phenomenal - the architecture is breathtaking, and the sheer space inside the mosque is impressive - looking at the mosque from the outside, it’s a dome stacked on top of lots of smaller domes and squares, similar to the look of the Blue Mosque, but the impressive thing is that the interior of the mosque (an I’m assuming most historic mosques here) is one giant open space. I will have to go back with my camera to get pictures.

The excursion to the Fatih Mosque was pretty short, even with stopping at another mosque before hand to enjoy the tranquility of the garden, we were done within and hour and a half, and went back to the police station to eat lunch and wait. By three, we were done at the police station, and all our forms were submitted, though we would need to return to pick up our residence permits next week after the government processed them all. By four-thirty we were back on campus napping.

It was a pretty painless experience, especially with Hakan around to help out, though it was unfortunate that we needed to travel so much and spend an entire day jumping through all the hoops of government paperwork.

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