Turkish plaka numbers: the complete list from 01 to 81

A Turkish licence plate always opens with two digits: 34 ABC 123. Those two digits are the province the car is registered in — 81 provinces, 81 numbers, 01 to 81 with no gaps. The rest, one to three letters and two to four digits, is a running serial and says nothing about where the car is from.

Unlike the German system, where the letters are derived from the city name (K for Köln, M for München), the Turkish numbers have to be learned. In exchange they are short, unambiguous and stable: a plate issued in the eighties carries the same province number as one issued today.

The full list, in the official order. Two provinces carry their older name in brackets, because the plate outlived the rename and both names are still in use.

From 01 to 67 the list is simply alphabetical: Adana, Adıyaman, Afyonkarahisar, Ağrı, and on to Zonguldak. Those were the provinces that existed when the system was introduced, and they were numbered straight through.

The two renamed provinces are the proof. 33 sits between Isparta and İstanbul, which only makes sense under its old name İçel; 46 sits between Manisa and Mardin, which only makes sense as Maraş. The alphabet in the list is the alphabet of the names as they were then.

From 68 the pattern stops. Aksaray, Bayburt, Karaman, Kırıkkale, Batman and the rest became provinces later and were numbered in the order they were created, ending with Düzce at 81 in 1999. That is why Batman is 72, wedged between Kırıkkale and Şırnak, instead of sitting up front with the other B provinces.

This is the one trick that makes the list learnable. For any number under 68, the alphabet tells you roughly which letters to expect — and it is almost always right.

Part of this list is already in your head: 34 İstanbul, 06 Ankara, 35 İzmir, 61 Trabzon. Nobody studies those. You pick them up from the cars parked outside on a summer street, from arguments about who is from where, from football.

A few carry a story that makes them stick harder than the rest. 46 is Kahramanmaraş, the city whose ice cream sticks to the knife. 27 is Gaziantep, and therefore baklava. 53 is Rize, where the tea comes from. Numbers like that you hear once and keep.

The mistakes people make are not random; they cluster around İstanbul. 34 is the city itself, but the cars on its roads come from all around it: 41 is Kocaeli, one hour east, 59 is Tekirdağ to the west, 16 is Bursa across the sea, and 77 is Yalova, the small province that broke away from İstanbul in 1995 and got a late number for it. Anyone who has queued at the ferry knows all five plates by sight without being able to name one of them.

The other cluster is the Black Sea coast, where the numbers run in alphabetical order but the towns do not: 53 Rize, 61 Trabzon, 28 Giresun, 52 Ordu and 55 Samsun sit next to each other on the map and nowhere near each other in the list. Knowing the coast does not help with the numbers; that is exactly why they make good quiz questions.

Going from the number to the city is the easy direction — four options, and the right one feels right immediately. It gets interesting the other way around. Which number is Kayseri? Which is Malatya? That is where almost everybody's confidence collapses, and where the arguments start.

So the plaka questions in the Türkenquiz run both ways, against a clock and against other people. Read the table above, then play a round: you find out quickly how much of it actually stuck.