Best Open Data APIs for Türkiye-focused Apps in 2026

Turkish state institutions publish more open data than most developers realize — exchange rates, statistics, earthquake feeds, weather, and religious calendar data are all available through official endpoints, free, and without a sales process. This shortlist covers the APIs that real Turkish apps tend to integrate.

Quick comparison

What "open" actually means here

For a Turkish open-data API to qualify for this list:

• It is published by an official institution (or a community mirror of one).
• You can use it for development and small production workloads without a paid plan.
• The endpoint is documented well enough to integrate in an afternoon.

Most Turkish state-published data is intended for public use, with attribution recommended. For redistribution at scale or commercial repackaging, double-check each source's terms.

API options

TCMB EVDS — economic time series

TCMB EVDS is the Central Bank of Türkiye's data delivery system, and the most comprehensive economic API the country exposes. It covers FX rates, inflation, interest rates, monetary aggregates, and dozens of macroeconomic series going back decades.

Use it when:

• You are building anything that needs Turkish macro indicators.
• You want historical time series, not just today's value.
• You are doing analysis, dashboards, or research.

Integration complexity is medium — you need to register for a key, learn the series IDs, and handle the response format (CSV/JSON/XML), but the documentation is solid.

TCMB Daily Exchange Rates (XML)

TCMB Daily Exchange Rates is the simpler sibling: a single XML file at /kurlar/today.xml with the official daily exchange rates, no key required.

Use it when:

• You just need today's USD/TRY, EUR/TRY, GBP/TRY, etc., for a widget or display.
• You don't want to register for an API key.
• You are happy parsing XML.

For a basic FX display this is the canonical source — every Turkish accounting tool, ERP, and dashboard pulls from here.

TÜİK — statistical datasets

TÜİK Veri Portalı is the Turkish Statistical Institute's data portal, exposing official datasets in JSON and CSV. Topics span population, demographics, employment, education, household surveys, and many more.

Use it when:

• You are doing demographic or socioeconomic analysis.
• You need authoritative sources for academic work or research projects.
• You want to build dashboards over Turkish census-level data.

The portal is browser-first; programmatic access requires reading dataset URLs from the catalog rather than a single REST API. Worth the friction for the data quality.

Kandilli — recent earthquakes

Kandilli Son Depremler is the Boğaziçi University Kandilli Observatory's recent earthquake list. It is the source most Turkish news outlets use for live quake reports.

Use it when:

• You want a quick list of recent earthquakes by region.
• You are building a hobby earthquake tracker or notification app.
• You can tolerate HTML parsing — this is a webpage, not a JSON API.

For anything more structured, prefer AFAD below.

AFAD — structured earthquake events

AFAD Earthquake API is the official structured earthquake event feed from the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority. It supports XML, CSV, KML, GeoJSON, and JSON, with time-window and geospatial filters.

Use it when:

• You need stable structured data for production.
• You want geospatial filtering (bounding box or radius).
• You are doing analysis by magnitude or depth.

A time window is required on every request — that's the one quirk to plan for.

MGM — Türkiye-specific weather

MGM reads forecast XML feeds published on the official Meteoroloji Genel Müdürlüğü website. For Türkiye-specific weather, no global API will match the local accuracy.

Use it when:

• You are building a weather widget for a Turkish product.
• You need city-level temperature data for Türkiye.
• You are happy with XML feeds and a defensive parser.

The caveat: this is unofficial in API terms — MGM publishes XML on their site, but does not document it as a stable API. Build defensively and monitor for breakage.

Imsakiyem — prayer times

Imsakiyem serves Diyanet-sourced prayer times (suhoor, iftar, the five daily prayers) with a city-district hierarchy and period-based endpoints (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly).

Use it when:

• You are building a Ramadan calendar, prayer reminder, or religious app.
• You need TR-specific city-district resolution.
• You want a keyless API.

For Türkiye-targeted apps, this is the obvious source — every Turkish prayer-time app pulls from data of this shape.

Picking the right one

Match the API to the use case:

• FX rates, simple display → TCMB Daily XML.
• FX rates, analysis or charts → TCMB EVDS.
• Demographics or statistics → TÜİK.
• Earthquake live feed → Kandilli (quick) or AFAD (structured).
• Local weather → MGM (with a global fallback).
• Prayer times → Imsakiyem.

Most Turkish products end up combining 2–3 of these — for example, a dashboard might pull TCMB EVDS for charts and AFAD for live earthquake alerts.

When not to use these APIs

These are excellent free options, but they are not the right fit when you need:

• A formal SLA or support contract. None of these come with one. For mission-critical production, plan for redundancy.
• Data redistribution at scale. Public data is not the same as licensed-for-redistribution data. Read the original source's terms before reselling or republishing.
• Stable schemas you can ignore for years. Some of these (Kandilli, MGM) are HTML/XML scrapes, and the structure can change. Monitor your parsers.

Related API Deposu entries

• TCMB EVDS
• TCMB Daily Exchange Rates
• TÜİK
• Kandilli Son Depremler
• AFAD Earthquake API
• MGM
• Imsakiyem Ezan Vakti API

Sources

• TCMB EVDS user guide
• TCMB Daily Exchange Rates XML
• TÜİK Veri Portalı
• Kandilli Son Depremler
• AFAD Earthquake event filter
• Meteoroloji Genel Müdürlüğü
• Imsakiyem Ezan Vakti API