Where Silence Lives: A Foreign Woman’s Life in Türkiye

I first arrived as a foreign woman in Türkiye on January 3rd, 2022.

It was ten days before my birthday, the coldest part of winter, and nothing felt welcoming except the silence. There was no central heating. No bathtub. No dishwasher. I woke up at seven in the morning expecting light — the kind of morning light I had always known — only to be met with complete darkness.

Not early-morning darkness.
Not peaceful darkness.
But a deep, unmoving black that felt like night had refused to end.

I sat there waiting.

Nine o’clock came before the grey finally softened the sky.

Life as a Foreign Woman in Türkiye

Living as a foreign woman in Türkiye has softened and sharpened me in ways I never expected.

There is no daylight savings time here, and where I live sits at the very edge of the time zone. Winter mornings are slow to arrive, and over time I stopped expecting light when I woke up. After almost four years, I now expect darkness. It no longer surprises me.

My mornings begin quietly — with dreams, then meditation, then coffee. My husband is usually gone by then, swallowed by construction sites and long, uncertain days depending on where his work takes us. The ezan, or Turkish call to prayer, comes later in winter, but I still sleep with noise-cancelling headphones from habit. The unexpected sounds of daily life once felt like an invasion. Sometimes they still do.

At this time of year, when my body remembers Christmas even though the streets do not, I play carols. I let Charles Dickens speak softly through my home. A Christmas Carol becomes a bridge between worlds. A reminder that I have not, somehow, disappeared.

That longing comes back every December, something I explored more deeply in Christmas in Türkiye, where joy and homesickness arrive in the same breath.

My husband tells me gently: You live here now.
He does not understand that this does not comfort me.
It deepens the ache instead.

There is a quiet loss that comes with becoming foreign.
And it starts in small, invisible places.

No one I knew would recognize the woman I’ve become here– a foreign woman in Türkiye. I dress differently. I speak less. I soften my voice without meaning to. My closet has become a museum of who I used to be — dresses worn to parties, jewelry from a louder life, pieces of a woman who once belonged somewhere obvious.

Here, women are watched.

Those subtle cultural expectations shape how foreign women move through life here, a story I tell more clearly in Living Between Two Worlds, where identity becomes something you renegotiate every day.

The teyzes notice everything. The uncles. The shopkeepers. The neighbors who lean over balconies. I am known as yabancı — the foreign one. They try to guess what I am: Russian, German, English. They never guess American. No one expects that voice or that spirit from someone like me.

Women here are expected to be quiet.
To drink nothing.
To stay away from kahves.
To dress in ways that do not attract attention.
To follow small, old rules about what a woman should be.

I am not built for small rules.

I worked in politics. I lived loud. I argued for a living. I was seen.

Learning new instincts happens quickly here, especially inside the home — a truth I share in Inside a Traditional Turkish Home, where small rituals become survival.

Here, my pale skin and red hair move ahead of me before I speak.

And still, I have adapted in ways that surprise me.

When I returned to the United States, I caught myself taking off my shoes without thinking. I threw toilet paper in the trash automatically. My body had learned new instincts.

My Turkish is not fluent enough for true belonging, and my English belongs to a country I no longer recognize. I exist somewhere in between. Not fully here. No longer there.

So I turned inward.

Or perhaps Türkiye broke something open in me that had long been sealed shut.

Life here is loud in ways no one prepares you for. The ezan rolls through the air five times a day. Some of that noise comes from the weekly Turkish pazar, which I wrote about as the heartbeat of community life in Türkiye. Cats fight. Neighbors shout across balconies — fighting or laughing, always loud. Construction starts early and ends late. Silence is a myth.

And yet, I forget that I am foreign when the cold water hits my skin and I curse my husband for still not buying the hot water heater. I forget when the earth moves beneath my feet and I barely look up. I forget when I take my shoes off without thinking. I forget when I shop for fresh food every single day. I forget that people once wore beautiful clothes to go to dinner. That they sat in restaurants. That they dressed up for reasons other than weddings.

Inflation has folded life inward here. Dining out has become rare. Fashion has become quiet. The village lives only for work — except for one night: New Year’s Eve.

And Christmas.

Christmas is where I feel it most — the loneliness, the distance, the fracture– a foreign woman in Türkiye with no traditions to truly call my own yet. That ache does not soften with time. That kind of grief waits quietly.

There is one mercy.

Our apartment faces west.

Every afternoon, the light pours in like forgiveness. The sunsets spill gold into our home. We live beside an olive grove, and when the moon rises I open the windows and let the air move through me.

That moment — the sun setting, the moon rising — is the best part of my day.

My cats anchor me. They are my truest companions. I speak to them. I sing to them. I fold myself around their warmth. When everything feels suspended, they make it real.

I do not know who I was before I was a foreign woman in Türkiye. I remember her, but she feels like a character in a film I once saw — familiar, distant, unrecoverable.

The future does not exist yet.

So I stay here.

In the present.
In the quiet.
In the confusion.
In the light.

And for now, the most honest thing I can do is to live this life without judgment — to accept it, to soften inside it, to let it be enough. I don’t know if I will ever fully belong anywhere, but this life as a foreign woman in Türkiye has taught me how to sit with myself. Perhaps that’s what I’d been searching for all along.