Turkey used to change its clocks twice a year like most of Europe. In March, clocks sprang forward. In October, they fell back. Then, in September 2016, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey would not fall back.

It has not fallen back since.

Turkey now runs on UTC+3 permanently. No daylight saving time. No clock changes. Year-round, fixed, done.

The decision

The official reason was energy efficiency. Erdogan’s government argued that staying on “summer time” year-round would reduce electricity demand by keeping evening daylight later and morning energy use lower. Similar arguments have been made by advocates of permanent summer time in Europe.

The unofficial reasons were more political. The 2016 decision came two months after the July 2016 coup attempt, a period of significant political disruption. Some observers noted that permanently misaligning with the EU’s timezone schedule had the side effect of creating friction with European institutions at a time when EU-Turkey relations were already strained.

The practical consequences were substantial. Turkey’s banking and trading systems had to update their UTC offset records globally. Software that assumed European DST schedules had to be patched. Coordination with EU partners, particularly for financial markets that open and close on the same clock, became more complicated.

The geography of the wrong timezone

Turkey is a large country, spanning about 36 degrees of longitude from the Greek border to the Iranian border. Istanbul, the city that straddles Europe and Asia, sits at 28.9 degrees East. Ankara, the capital, is at 32.9 degrees East. The eastern city of Van is at 43.4 degrees East.

At UTC+3 in winter, Istanbul’s solar noon occurs at about 12:07 PM. That is reasonable. But in the far east of Turkey, near the borders with Iran, Iraq, and Armenia, solar noon in winter is already past 1 PM local time. In summer, with the sun high and UTC+3 running behind solar time, eastern Turkey gets sunrise before 4:30 AM and sunset at 7:30 PM. The clock does not match the light.

This is not unique to Turkey. Many large countries have timezone boundaries that create significant solar time mismatches in their eastern or western extremities. But it means that Turkey’s permanent UTC+3 is a politically unified clock stretched across a country where the sun does not agree uniformly.

The city between worlds

Istanbul is the only major city in the world spanning two continents. The Bosphorus strait divides Europe and Asia, and Istanbul’s Asian and European sides both run on UTC+3.

This is not philosophically trivial. The city was Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for more than a thousand years, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire for nearly five centuries. It has been one of the world’s principal cities for over 1,600 years. The temporal positioning of Istanbul, between Greenwich and Moscow, between the European timezone system and the Middle Eastern one, is a small metaphor for its geographic and cultural reality.

Atatürk and the modern clock

Modern Turkey’s relationship with standardized timekeeping goes back to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms of the 1920s and 1930s. The Ottoman Empire had used the Islamic lunar calendar and local solar time. Atatürk adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1926 and standardized civil time as part of the broader program of European-style modernization.

The 2016 decision to diverge from European timezone practice is, in that context, an interesting reversal: choosing national convenience over European alignment, one small step back from the Kemalist project of European integration.

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