1 June 2026·TURKPOL Editorial
The Polish presence in Türkiye is older than the Republic and older than modern Poland. It arrives in waves, and each wave looks nothing like the one before.
Four waves
The exiles (1840s). After the November Uprising failed, Polish political emigration spread across Europe and beyond. In 1842 it produced a village: Adampol, now Polonezköy.
The officers (1850s). Polish soldiers entered Ottoman service in numbers, particularly around the Crimean War. General Józef Bem — a commander of the Hungarian revolution of 1848–49 — became Murad Pasha. Michał Czajkowski became Mehmed Sadık Pasha and raised Cossack units under Ottoman colours. It was the one period in which a Pole without a country could command troops under his own strategy.
The specialists (1920s onwards). The young Republic of Türkiye recruited foreign engineers, architects, doctors and teachers for a state being rebuilt at speed. Poles were among them, and the Polish–Turkish Treaty of Friendship of 1923 gave that movement a legal frame.
The residents (2000s onwards). The current wave is the least dramatic and the largest. Poles live in Türkiye today as employees of international firms, as spouses in mixed families, as retirees and as long-stay residents — concentrated heavily on the Mediterranean coast, Antalya above all.
The poet
Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's national poet, died in Constantinople on 26 November 1855. He had come to help raise a Polish legion to fight in the Crimean War. The house where he died is now a museum — an unusual thing for two countries to share, and the subject of our earlier briefing.
Poland's national poet is buried at Wawel. He died in Istanbul. Both facts are load-bearing.
On numbers, again
As with the Turkish community in Poland, we avoid a single figure. Residence in Türkiye is recorded through residence permits, EU citizens move freely for long stays, and seasonal residence on the coast makes any annual snapshot unstable. Polish consular services and the Turkish Directorate General of Migration Management are the sources to consult.
Why the wave metaphor holds
Each wave came for an entirely different reason — politics, soldiering, technical work, ordinary life — and each left something behind that the next one inherited. A village, a set of names in Ottoman service records, a museum, and now a coastline where Polish is a language shopkeepers recognise.