Hi Rocky1, yes this is the first time we’ve renewed them from Türkiye. We could have done them ourselves, however, decided to take the stress out of it by paying someone else and really pleased we did, as would not have known about documents being held at UK customs. Plus some courier companies in Türkiye are charging double fees per person to ship them back to the UK.

Also, we’d read that PTT is not a viable option anymore to send them, although do hear about people using this service and probably not disclosing the contents correctly. Although some PTT offices check contents before being sealed…

I’ll post new updates as and when I have further information…

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 5 days ago by gaz8587.

Hi Rocky1, the UK customs holding ID documents has been going on for sometime apparently. We were fortunate that someone we knew friend was flying back to the UK and posted them for us.

We received our new passports and old passports and supporting documents back to us in Türkiye within 10 days including the weekend… Pretty excellent result, plus we could track their progress with DHL every step of the way 😊

Hi Rocky, no they don’t keep them, they are delayed until they have spoken to the sender who then has to provide extra information and a payment, I don’t know how much. This was the case in November when we did ours, however that might have changed.

The best way to avoid this is to ask someone going back to the UK to post it. We personally didn’t know of anyone, however the person who we paid to do our applications, had a friend who was going back. I’ve seen lots of people on other platforms asking if they can be of help.

We could have done all this ourselves, however decided to take the stress out of it and pay someone else.

We went to our local Göç Office, after making an online appointment, and we actually took 2 buses to get there, and it was very straightforward and easy, the second bus dropped us off at the bottom of the street on the main road, and it was a 10 minute walk from there.

Our local translator helped us and instructed us what documents and copies to take, I took every single document originals and copies, and anything notarised that we’d ever needed during our 18 years here. Our translator also went to the Tax Office with our kimliks and paid the 810 TL for each of us to replace our long-term kimliks with the new chipped versions.

At the Göç Office we had to fill in a form, to say what we wanted, we arrived early and were seen early too. Göç Officer was serious, efficient, meticulous and approachable. Once he’d updated the system with our new passports etc, he gave us our old kimliks back and said when new one’s received destroy the old ones.

İt took exactly one week for us both to receive our new kimliks.

Then a couple of weeks ago, our doorbell rang and there was 3 burly Jandarma stood there, I nearly fell over, I called hubby, they didn’t want to see our new kimliks or any other form of ID, they were doing address checks. They were very nice, jolly and friendly.