🌍 How Rare Are You in Turkey?
🇹🇷 Genetic Landscape of Turkey
Turkey sits at a genetic crossroads between Europe and Asia, producing extraordinary phenotypic diversity. Turkic Central Asian origins blend with ancient Anatolian, Greek, Armenian, Kurdish, and Arab ancestry. Western Turkey (Thrace, Aegean) shows stronger European genetic markers with higher rates of light eyes and fair skin. Eastern Turkey carries more Middle Eastern and Kurdish heritage. Green eyes (~10%) and hazel eyes (~15%) are remarkably common — 5× and 3× global averages respectively. The unique mix of Oghuz Turkic and indigenous Anatolian genetics makes Turkey one of the most phenotypically varied nations in the Mediterranean region.
Much of that mixture was reshuffled within living memory rather than in antiquity. The 1923 population exchange with Greece emptied and refilled whole villages on both coasts of the Aegean, and earlier waves brought Circassians and Abkhaz fleeing the Caucasus, Bosniaks and Pomaks leaving the shrinking Ottoman Balkans, and Crimean Tatars crossing the Black Sea. Anatolia absorbed all of them. Naming started almost from scratch: hereditary family names became compulsory only with the Surname Law of 1934, so most Turkish surnames are younger than the republic itself and were often chosen for sound or meaning — Demir, Yılmaz, Öztürk. A rare surname here usually means a family made an unusual choice in one particular year, not that it descends from a rare line.
🗂️ What Turkey's register has a box for
Turkey's family register is governed by Law 5490, passed on 25 April 2006. Article 7 lists what the register holds on every citizen: national ID number, the place and volume the record sits in, name and surname, sex, parents' names, place and date of birth, later changes and corrections, religion, marital status, address and a photograph. Religion is item (e), and Article 35 lets a person have that entry registered, changed, left blank or deleted on written declaration alone. Blood type is not on the list — it appears on the chip ID card only when the holder asks, copied from a driving licence, an existing record or a health certificate.
Nothing on that list is a colour. Law 5490 gives the family register no field for eye colour or hair colour, which is why the tables below carry two very different kinds of number: some with a publisher and an exact headcount, others global estimates.
👁️ Eye Color
| Brown | 45% |
| Hazel | 15% |
| Dark Brown | 15% |
| Green | 10% |
| Blue | 8% |
| Amber | 5% |
| Gray | 2% |
💇 Hair Color
| Black | 45% |
| Dark Brown | 35% |
| Brown | 12% |
| Auburn/Red | 4% |
| Blonde | 3% |
| Other | 1% |
🩸 Blood Type
| A+ | 33% |
| O+ | 30% |
| B+ | 12% |
| A- | 8% |
| O- | 7% |
| AB+ | 6% |
| B- | 3% |
| AB- | 1% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets — see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Turkey
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Turkey's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
📊 Ten surnames, 7.4 million people
TÜİK, the state statistics office, publishes a headcount for the most common surnames, year by year and province by province. In the 2025 table Yılmaz is carried by 1,177,896 people, Kaya by 899,722 and Demir by 876,934, then Çelik, Yıldız, Şahin, Yıldırım, Öztürk, Aydın and, tenth, Özdemir at 556,378. The same portal puts the population on the address-based register at 86,092,168, so Yılmaz alone is about one person in 73. Add the top ten together and they come to 7.4 million — roughly one person in twelve.
The ranking is not the same everywhere. Pull the same dataset by province and Hakkari's most common surname is Kaya, at 6,144, with Yılmaz only fourth; in Mardin it is Demir at 16,225, and in Şırnak Demir again at 5,330. Yılmaz leads in İstanbul with 230,115 and in Rize with 8,878. A national frequency is an average over places that disagree.
🔡 Turkey's two letter i's
Turkish writes the Latin alphabet — adopted by Law 1353, published in the Official Gazette on 3 November 1928 — but it keeps two separate letter i's: dotted i and İ, dotless ı and I. Unicode carries a casing rule written specifically for Turkish and Azeri to cope with this. Under the 'tr' condition, capital I lowercases to ı and small i uppercases to İ, which is not what the default mappings do. The file that holds it, SpecialCasing.txt, notes that I and dotless i, and I-dot and i, are case pairs in Turkish and Azeri.
That matters for anything that matches names, including our own name rarity tool. Software using English casing turns YILMAZ into yilmaz rather than yılmaz, so one surname can end up in two forms that a later comparison reads as two different names. Whether two Turkish names count as the same name depends on which rule the software used.
⭐ Rare Facts About Turkey
Where these numbers come from
The surname and population counts here are exports from Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu's Nüfus İstatistikleri Portalı, 2025 figures from the address-based register. The register rules are Law 5490; the ID-card rule comes from the İçişleri Bakanlığı's Nüfus ve Vatandaşlık İşleri Genel Müdürlüğü; the casing rule is Unicode's SpecialCasing.txt. The eye colour, hair colour, blood type and height figures in the tables above are the site's global estimates, not Turkish official counts — Law 5490 gives the family register no field for eye or hair colour. Last checked September 2026.