Zevri arrives in the city center by metro with two friends, planning to spend the afternoon at a café. He is 17 years old and has been living in Ankara for only a few months, where he is in his third year of high school. He dreams of attending university in Istanbul—or perhaps in a European capital.
“I’m a Crimean Tatar, and until last summer I lived there,” he says. “Then my father and I decided that the best solution for me, and for my future, might be to go abroad. He accompanied me to Turkey and then returned home. It hasn’t been easy to live in our homeland since the Russians took power, and the war has made everything worse.”
For his family, the choice of destination came naturally. Turkey is home to several Crimean Tatar communities and cultural centers capable of connecting every newcomer with the wider diaspora. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the networking efforts carried out not only in Ankara but also in other Turkish cities became essential for welcoming new arrivals, not merely for maintaining ties with the homeland and preserving cultural identity.
Like many before him—both young people and adults—the teenager was immediately offered accommodation at the headquarters of the Ankara organization.
“Here I found a second family,” he says. “I miss my parents, as well as my brother and sister. They are older than me and chose to stay, despite everything. They invested in our homeland when it was still possible, and for them having to leave everything behind once again would be too great a defeat.”
Zevri has clear ideas about his future. Passionate about geopolitics, he hopes that Russia will eventually be forced to surrender.
“As Crimean Tatars, we feel Ukrainian, and we support Ukraine in this war. But we have not forgotten our roots or what makes us unique. We are Muslims, and we share the same faith as many other people around the world, yet the way we practice it is different because we have lived through a different history.”
Despite the conflict, daily contact with his family remains possible—provided that conversations avoid any mention of the occupation, political decisions, developments on the battlefield, or expressions of dissent. Phone calls between Zevri and his relatives are brief and superficial.
“People risk arrest simply for displaying a banner, a flag, or uttering the wrong word,” he says. “You do not need to commit any serious crime to end up in prison, and most detainees in Crimea are Tatars. Turkey has given me back the possibility of being free, even if the price is living far away from the people I love.”
Bekir (a pseudonym) also feels freer in Turkey. Born and raised in Crimea until 2014, the 25-year-old now lives in Eskişehir, the Turkish city with the country’s largest Crimean Tatar diaspora.
“After the 2014 annexation, I moved to Kyiv, where I attended university and volunteered to help other displaced people from Crimea and the Donbas,” he recalls. “Throughout those years, we always tried to preserve the cultural aspects of our identity and to promote them among Ukrainians, many of whom knew very little about us.”
Bekir studied communications, languages, and law, and worked briefly as a journalist. It was in the Ukrainian capital that he met Anyfe, the founder of the Crimean Family association, who now lives in Ankara and chose Eskişehir as the base for her project dedicated to supporting displaced people and preserving Crimean Tatar cultural heritage.
“She was the one who invited me to teach the Tatar language at the cultural center,” Bekir explains. “When the full-scale invasion began in 2022, I decided to leave with her and the group that is now rebuilding its life here.”
The center where he lives today is located on the outskirts of Eskişehir and hosts around seventy residents, most of them women and children. Its activities are coordinated by Iryna, who grew up in Donetsk, was first displaced to Kyiv, then briefly to Lviv, and eventually arrived in Turkey.
“When separatists occupied my city, I decided to leave and move to Kyiv with my family,” she recalls. “There I started a new life. My husband and I decided to buy a house in a residential area outside the capital, somewhere well connected and with good services. It was 2018.”
The town where Iryna chose to settle was Bucha, which four years later would become the site of one of the worst massacres of civilians committed by Russian forces at the start of the war.
“In an instant, we found ourselves under occupation once again,” she says. “It was an extremely difficult moment, when we truly believed we would not survive. We fled yet again, leaving another part of our lives behind. We reached Lviv, and as soon as we managed to organize our departure, we took a bus to Turkey. Here we started over from scratch. Again.”
The local authorities in Eskişehir, together with the Turkish government, supported the evacuation and resettlement of these refugees, thanks in part to the international efforts of Ukraine’s current ambassador to Turkey, Nariman Dzhelyalov. Vice-chairman of the Mejlis—the representative body of the Crimean Tatars—from 2013 onward, Dzhelyalov became a symbol of resistance to Russian occupation after the Mejlis was banned by Moscow in 2016, paying the price with nearly three years in prison.
According to figures released by the Ukrainian Embassy and updated at the end of 2023, around 38,000 Ukrainian citizens were living in Turkey before 2022. During the first year of the war, 844,000 new arrivals entered the country, although many later continued on to Europe. No specific statistics exist for Crimean Tatars, but they are believed to make up the majority of those who decided to remain in Turkey. As of 2025, their number stands at just over 31,000.
“I feel closer to Crimea here in Turkey,” Iryna explains, “where we have found hospitality and a culture that feels familiar, than I would if I stayed in Ukraine without being able to return home. It is even harder to be just a step away from your former life and forced to look at it through a window. It is better to make a radical choice, escape the war, and hold on to hope.”