The 81 provinces of Turkey are divided into 957 districts (ilçeler; sing. ilçe). In the early Turkish Republic and in the Ottoman Empire, the corresponding unit was the kaza.
The district bears the same name as the district capital (with the exception of the district of Antakya (in Hatay)).
A district may cover both rural and urban areas. One district of a province is the "central district" (merkez ilçe); the central district is administered by an appointed "vice-governor" and other districts by a "sub-governor" (kaymakam). Each municipality (belediye) in the urban zone (belde) of a district is an administrative division subject to elections depending on the province.
Each district (including the central district) corresponds to a specific area within the province. The area is administered from the "district center" (ilçe merkezi, not to be confused with "central district" merkez ilçe), where resides the appointed kaymakam, the head official for that district, who is responsible to the province governor. Central districts do not have kaymakams, they are administered by a vice-governor.
All district centers have municipalities (belediye), headed by an elected mayor, who administers a defined municipality area (usually matching the urban zone) for defined municipal matters. A growing number of settlements, which are outside of district centers, have municipalities as well, usually because their population requires one. These are (also) called belde. They haven't (yet) become district centers because there is one close by, or due to some other reason. A belde has a mayor (responsible for its municipal zone), but not a kaymakam, and depends administratively on the district center of the district within whose boundaries it is situated.
At the bottom end, there are villages, who have elected muhtars taking care of specific administrative matters such as residence registration. Furthermore, each quarter (mahalle) of a district center and belde has a muhtar as well, also for specific administrative questions. The designation slightly differs (köy muhtarı for village muhtar, mahalle muhtarı for quarter muhtar) and also the tasks, which are largely similar but adapted to their locality.
In some cases, a belde has become larger than the district center it depends on, and a district center larger than the central district it depends on (and many other district centers). One final note is the büyükşehir belediyesi (or greater municipality) for metropolises like İstanbul or İzmir, an extra administrative layer which has at its top an elected head mayor, who oversee a number of municipalities and mayors.
The districts and their populations (as of December 31, 2011) are listed below, by region and by province (with capital district in bold text):
However, it should be noted that, in 16 provinces with greater municipality, the total population of province is not equal to the summation of all district populations. In greater municipalities some (in case of İstanbul and Kocaeli all) districts are within the capital city. Those intercity districts are shown as " (central district) " . The population in central districts is also shown in the boldface capital city. So in greater municipalities, the actual population of the province is the sum of all district populations except the boldface capital city. (This is true only for 16 greater municipalities; Adana, Ankara, Antalya, Bursa, Diyarbakır, Erzurum, Eskişehir, Gaziantep, İstanbul, İzmir, Kayseri, Kocaeli, Konya, Mersin, Sakarya, Samsun. For the remaining 65 provinces the population figures for districts add up to total province population ) (see: Metropolitan centers in Turkey)
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