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Nearly all of the roughly 200 people who live in the village of Karacanlik, in southern Türkiye’s Hatay province, carry the same surname: Oztoprak.
The coincidence surprises first-time visitors and has pushed residents to come up with workarounds in daily life. Parents give children double names to keep them apart, and neighbors tell each other apart by their fathers’ names.
Karacanlik, in the Reyhanli district, lies about 30 kilometers (18.64 miles) from the district center. It is named for the karacan trees that once grew thickly in the area.
The village has been settled since the 1950s, and every family there descends from two forefathers, Hasan and Tahir. As a result, apart from public employees such as the imam and the school principal, everyone living on the village’s 17 streets has the same surname on their ID.
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Village head Ali Oztoprak said the overlap used to be a serious headache. To avoid mix-ups, he said, families either give children paired names, such as Ahmet Mustafa or Mehmet Mustafa, or choose names rarely heard in the village, such as Efnan or Arya.
Official paperwork is no longer much of a problem now that everyone has a national ID number. "Identity was a problem until our age," Oztoprak said. "After our generation, it started to fade."
Today, the problem shows up mostly in household bills, said resident Ahmet Oztoprak. With several people sharing the same first and last name, it can be hard to tell who a bill belongs to, and sometimes that becomes clear only after it has been paid.
"Sometimes I pay someone else’s bill, and sometimes someone else pays mine," he said. "We work it out among ourselves and settle up afterward." Neighbors check payments through e-Devlet, the government’s online services portal, to see who owes whom.
In everyday life, residents lean on fathers’ names rather than nicknames. People are known as "Ahmet, son of Halit," "Yakup, son of Halit."
Some also use Arabic-style names, such as Ahmet Alkali and Yakup Alkali. When an outsider asks for a particular Oztoprak, locals point out that people with the same surname live in neighboring villages, too.
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