Forest Annotations on Turkish Title Deeds: What Law 7584 Changed
Of all the things that can be registered against a Turkish title deed, a forest annotation is the one that can end in the deed being cancelled altogether. In June 2026 Turkey rewrote the rules for these properties — and set a two-year clock running. Here is what the change does, who it reaches, and the exclusion that matters most to buyers on the coast.
A title deed can exist, be valid, be paid for — and still be inside a forest
Foreign buyers in Turkey learn early that a title deed is more than a name and an address. Registered against it are the constraints that travel with the property: mortgages, liens, disputes, and the formal annotations Turkish law calls şerh. Most annotations restrict what an owner may do. A forest annotation — orman şerhi — is different in kind, because it raises a question about whether the ownership itself will survive.
The mechanism is not fraud and it is rarely anybody’s fault. Turkey has run two separate mapping exercises across the same ground for decades: the general cadastre, which records parcels and owners, and the forest cadastre, which fixes the boundary of State forest. Where the two disagree, a parcel that has been bought, sold, inherited and taxed as private property for years can be found, on finalisation of the forest cadastre, to sit partly or wholly inside the forest boundary. State forest in Turkey cannot be privately owned. So the registry is annotated, and in some cases the title is cancelled by a court and the parcel registered to the Treasury.
That is the problem Law No. 7584 was written to address. Published in Official Gazette No. 33286 on 20 June 2026, it added a new provision — Ek Madde 22 — to Forest Law No. 6831 through its Article 14, and it does two things at once: it lets certain existing private titles stand and clears the annotation off them, and it opens a route for owners whose deeds were already cancelled to get the property back. Both come with conditions, and one of them has a carve-out that speaks directly to the parts of Turkey where international buyers concentrate.
For the wider picture of what a Turkish deed records and how to read one, see our guide to the tapu and the title deed system. If you are looking at a plot rather than an apartment, the companion piece on buying land in Turkey covers zoning designations and the checks specific to bare land.
Law No. 7584 — The Essentials
The forest-title provision at a glance
How to check a property for forest exposure before you buy
None of this is exotic. It is a handful of records, requested in the right order, before any money moves.
Pull the complete title deed record, not a photograph of the front
The front of a tapu shows the owner, the parcel and the share. The part that matters here is the page listing what is registered against the property — encumbrances, liens and annotations. A forest annotation, where one exists, lives there. If a seller or agent supplies only a phone photograph of the deed, you have not seen the record.
Ask specifically whether the forest cadastre has been finalised for the area
Ek Madde 22 is written around properties designated as State forest under a finalised forest cadastre. Whether the forest cadastre in the relevant locality has been completed and finalised is a factual question with a documentary answer, and it changes the shape of the risk. An unfinalised area is not a clean bill of health — it means the boundary question is still open.
Have the registered boundary walked against the ground
This is the same discipline that applies to any land purchase in Turkey, and it matters doubly where a forest boundary is nearby. The fence, the wall, the track and the tree line are not the boundary. Have the cadastral boundary physically identified against the record, and note where it sits relative to any forest edge.
Establish whether the parcel is registered to a private party or to the Treasury
The distinction runs through the whole of Ek Madde 22. Properties still registered in the name of a natural or legal person sit in one branch of the provision. Properties whose deeds were cancelled by court decision and registered in the name of the Treasury sit in the other, and are reachable only by a former owner or their successor applying inside the two-year window.
Check the exclusion list against the parcel’s designation
The remedy does not reach every property. Parcels within culture and tourism protection zones and tourism centres under Law No. 2634 are excluded, as are areas under the Bosphorus provisions of Law No. 2960, burned forest areas, pasture land under Law No. 4342, and land distributed under several older settlement and olive-cultivation statutes. Establish which designations, if any, apply.
Get a Turkish lawyer to read the file before you commit funds
A forest question is not one to resolve by correspondence with a seller. It is read from the cadastral record, the forest cadastre file and, where the title was litigated, the court decision. Our note on using a lawyer to buy property in Turkey sets out what that engagement should cover.
Six terms that decide the outcome
Forest title questions are argued in a specific vocabulary. Knowing what each term does makes the rest of the file readable.
Orman şerhi
The forest annotation itself: a note in the land registry recording that the parcel is affected by the forest boundary. It does not by itself cancel ownership, but it flags that ownership is in question.
Forest cadastre
The separate mapping exercise that fixes where State forest begins and ends. Ek Madde 22 applies to designations made under a forest cadastre that had been finalised before 20 June 2026.
2/B land
Land excluded from the forest regime because it lost its forest character, historically handled under its own legislation. It is a different category from a live forest annotation, and buyers routinely conflate the two.
Title cancellation
Where a court has ruled the parcel to be State forest, the private deed is cancelled and the property is registered to the Treasury. This is the outcome the restitution branch of Ek Madde 22 is designed to reverse.
Orman Genel Müdürlüğü
The General Directorate of Forestry. Under Ek Madde 22 it approves applications, and separately conducts its own investigations to confirm registry records without any application being made.
Tazminat
Compensation previously paid to an owner whose title was cancelled. Where it was received, Ek Madde 22 requires it to be repaid before the property can come back — and not at the historic figure.
Which situations Ek Madde 22 is written for
The provision is narrower than the headlines suggest. This is the shape of it — but the categories overlap in practice, and only the file will tell you which one a parcel is in.
| Situation | Within the new provision? | What it turns on |
|---|---|---|
| Parcel registered to a private owner, annotated as forest, not Treasury-registered | Yes — the primary branch | Written application by the owner or a party to the cadastral dispute, and approval by the General Directorate of Forestry. |
| Registry record confirmed correct by the Directorate’s own investigation | Yes — no application needed | The Directorate acts of its own motion, verifies the existing record and the annotation is cleared without the owner applying. |
| Deed cancelled by court, parcel now registered to the Treasury | Yes — the restitution branch | Application by the former owner or their legal successor within two years of 20 June 2026, plus repayment of any compensation received. |
| Parcel inside a culture and tourism protection zone or tourism centre (Law No. 2634) | No — expressly excluded | The designation itself. This is the exclusion most likely to catch a coastal purchase. |
| Parcel inside the Bosphorus areas under Law No. 2960, or a burned forest area | No — expressly excluded | Excluded by category, regardless of how long the parcel has been privately held. |
| Pasture land under Law No. 4342, or land distributed under the older settlement statutes | No — expressly excluded | The statute under which the land was originally allocated or classified. |
Two routes in, and a bill at the end of one of them
Ek Madde 22 does not work as a single amnesty. It has a branch for properties that are still in private hands and a branch for properties that have already been lost, and they behave differently.
The first branch is about clearing the annotation. Where a parcel is registered in the land registry in the name of a natural or legal person, is not registered to the Treasury, and the owner — or a party to the cadastral dispute — applies in writing, the existing title can be deemed valid and the forest annotation cancelled, subject to the approval of the General Directorate of Forestry. There is a second, quieter path within the same branch: where the Directorate conducts its own investigation and confirms that the registry record for the private party is accurate, the correction follows without anybody having applied at all.
The second branch is about getting a property back. Where a court has already cancelled the deed and the parcel now sits in the name of the Treasury, the former owner or their legal successor may apply for its return — but only within two years running from 20 June 2026, and only on the compensation terms below. This is the part of the provision with a deadline attached, and it is why the change is worth knowing about even if you are not currently buying.
Compensation is the sting. If no compensation was ever paid for the cancelled title, the position is straightforward and the title can be validated or the property returned without payment. If compensation was received, the total has to be repaid to the Treasury — and the repayment is not calculated at the historic amount. Under the provision it cannot be less than the property’s current appraised value, determined by the methodology used by the National Property General Directorate under Law No. 6292. For a parcel that has appreciated since the compensation was paid, that is a materially different number from the one that went out.
There is also a piece of housekeeping in the law that tells you how seriously the forest estate is being protected on the other side of the ledger. Where an annotation is cleared or a property returned, the final paragraph of Article 8 requires equivalent-sized State or Treasury land to be transferred to the Forestry Directorate for reforestation or forest use. The forest area is meant to come out whole; it is the individual parcels that move.
Why the tourism carve-out matters more than the rest of the list
Read the exclusion list quickly and it looks like a set of technical categories from mid-century land legislation: olive cultivation under Law No. 3573, settlement land under the repealed Law No. 4753, State purchases under Law No. 4785, distributed forest areas under provisions of the repealed Law No. 3116, pasture under Law No. 4342. For most foreign buyers these are historical curiosities.
Two entries on the list are not. Areas within the Bosphorus special-status provisions of Law No. 2960 are excluded, along with burned forest areas. And, most consequentially for the readers of this site, so are properties within culture and tourism protection zones and tourism centres designated under Law No. 2634, the Tourism Encouragement Law.
The significance is one of geography. Those designations are not scattered at random across Anatolia. They cluster along exactly the stretches of coast where international purchasing is concentrated, and where pine forest runs down to the shoreline — which is also, of course, where forest boundaries and building plots are most likely to meet in the first place. A buyer looking at a villa plot on a wooded slope above a resort coastline is looking at the intersection of the highest likelihood of a forest boundary question and the clearest statutory exclusion from the remedy.
None of that makes coastal land unbuyable. It makes the pre-purchase check non-optional. If you are buying in an area with any tourism designation, treat “is there a forest question here, and is it inside or outside the new remedy?” as a question to answer before an offer rather than after one. The general checks in our guide to the pitfalls foreign buyers fall into apply here with particular force, since this is a risk that sits on the annotations page most buyers never ask to see.
What the 2026 packages did not change
Law No. 7584 arrived as the second of two omnibus property statutes in 2026. The first, Law No. 7579, was published in Official Gazette No. 33261 on 22 May 2026 and reached into more than a dozen laws at once — the Cadastre Law, the Condominium Ownership Law, the Zoning Law, building inspection and more. We covered that package separately in our briefing on Turkey’s 2026 property law changes.
What neither package touched is the framework foreign investors ask about most. The citizenship-by-investment route was left alone in 2026: no threshold, holding period or eligibility condition was altered, and the property route continues to require a purchase at the established minimum value held under a three-year commitment annotated on the title. Our شهروندی ترکیه از طریق سرمایه گذاری page sets out the current requirements in full.
Nor did 2026 change the ownership limits that apply to foreign individuals: the nationwide ceiling on total area held, the district-level share limit, and the restrictions on military and special security zones all continue to work as before. Those are covered in can foreigners buy property in Turkey.
The honest summary of 2026, then, is that the rules on who may buy stayed still while the rules on what you are buying got tighter and more explicit. Forest annotations are a good example: the underlying risk existed long before June 2026, but it was previously handled case by case through the courts. Ek Madde 22 gives it a named statutory route, a decision-maker, an exclusion list and a deadline. For a buyer, that is progress — provided you look.
Buying land or a villa plot on a wooded coastline?
We run the title deed record, annotations and boundary checks before anything is signed, with licensed Turkish conveyancers.
Where to go next
The rest of our title, land and due-diligence library.
- The tapu explained — what a Turkish title deed records and how to read the annotations page.
- Buying land in Turkey — building plots, agricultural fields and the checks that separate them.
- Turkey’s 2026 property law changes — what Law No. 7579 altered for owners.
- Pitfalls foreign buyers fall into — the seven omissions behind most problems.
- Do you need a lawyer to buy in Turkey? — what a conveyancing engagement should cover.
- Can foreigners buy property in Turkey? — ownership caps and restricted zones.
- All Turkey property guides — the full library for international buyers.
- Turkey property buyer’s guide — the complete purchase walk-through.
Forest annotations and Turkish title deeds — frequently asked questions
What the annotation means, what Law No. 7584 changed, and the checks to run before you buy.
Have the checks run before you commit
Tell us the parcel you are considering and we will have the title deed record, annotations, cadastral boundary and zoning designations checked before anything is signed. We work with licensed Turkish conveyancers and appraisers, and every transaction settles through the secure payment system.
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