'My Grandfather's House No Longer Exists in the Records': Istanbul Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement in Property Archives

Dozens of Istanbul property owners have discovered in recent months that the reference photographs attached to their title deeds and cadastral records have been silently replaced with newer images — images that, in some cases, show buildings that have been demolished, altered, or do not match the structures their families have occupied for generations. The replacements are happening inside the digital archive managed by the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre, known by its Turkish acronym TKGM, as part of a system-wide digitisation and deduplication effort that began rolling out across Istanbul's 39 districts in late 2025.

The timing matters. Istanbul sits on active fault lines, and since the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes killed more than 50,000 people across southern Turkey, municipal and national authorities have accelerated building-inventory surveys across the city. Accurate photographic records attached to cadastral files are used by engineers, insurers, and courts to establish a property's pre-survey condition. When those photos are replaced without notification, the evidentiary baseline shifts — sometimes in ways that disadvantage owners.

Fatih, Kadıköy, Bağcılar: Where the Complaints Are Clustering

Property owners from at least three districts — Fatih on the historic peninsula, Kadıköy on the Asian side, and Bağcılar in the western suburbs — have filed formal objections at their local TKGM branch offices since January 2026. The Fatih cases are particularly concentrated around the Zeyrek neighbourhood, where Ottoman-era timber houses registered decades ago now show replacement images that do not reflect the structures' historic fabric. In Kadıköy, several apartment co-owners on Moda Caddesi say their building's archive photo was replaced with an image of a structurally different property on the same street. In Bağcılar, a district that has undergone rapid, dense construction since the 1990s, residents report that older images documenting pre-permit construction have been swapped out for post-renovation shots.

The Istanbul Bar Association's property law commission began receiving related inquiries from member attorneys in February 2026. Lawyers handling inheritance disputes say the duplicate-image replacement problem is compounding existing backlogs at the Istanbul Civil Courts of First Instance, where cadastral photographs are routinely submitted as evidence. Without the original image, a claim about a building's condition or footprint at a specific historical moment becomes harder to substantiate.

Community members describe the experience in consistent terms: they visit a TKGM branch, request their file, and find a photo they do not recognise attached to their parcel number. The deduplication algorithm, designed to eliminate redundant scans, appears in some cases to have matched images by geographic coordinates alone, pulling in a photograph from a neighbouring parcel or a later survey date. TKGM has not issued a public statement on the scope of the replacements, and the directorate did not respond to written questions submitted by The Daily Istanbul on June 30.

What Residents Are Being Told to Do — and What That Actually Costs

At the Fatih TKGM branch on Hırka-i Şerif Mahallesi, staff are directing affected owners to submit a formal objection form, known as an itiraz dilekçesi, along with any original photographs or notarised documents they hold. The process requires a certified translation if supporting documents are in a foreign language — relevant for Istanbul's Syrian and other migrant communities holding property registered partly in Arabic. Legal aid providers, including the İstanbul Barosu's free consultation clinics held every Tuesday at the Çağlayan courthouse complex, have seen walk-in numbers rise since March.

Filing an objection does not freeze an active earthquake-risk assessment tied to the property. That means a building flagged for urgent structural review under Istanbul's urban transformation law — Law No. 6306, passed in 2012 — could proceed toward a demolition or renovation order while the owner is still disputing which photograph belongs in the file. For residents in Bağcılar and other districts covered by active urban transformation zones, that sequence can move quickly.

Owners who have documentary evidence — old utility bills showing building dimensions, earlier notary records, or georeferenced photographs taken before 2020 — are in a stronger position. Those who relied entirely on the state's own archive have fewer options. The Istanbul Bar Association's commission has called on TKGM to publish a list of affected parcel numbers and to suspend cadastral-photo-dependent decisions on flagged properties until a verification process is in place. Whether the directorate acts before more urban transformation orders land on disputed files is the question now pressing hardest on the families involved.