Yestarday, a need arose to create a simple library to verify a person’s identity using their National Identity Cards, (of the Republic of Turkey, where this story takes place.) to do so, I Google’d a little and stumbled upon a public API by the relevant government authority. It used an older system than I used to, but it was working fine, and I was able to create a small Python library, PyTCID.

While creating PyTCID, as I read the documentation of the said API, I realised something strange, the XML input needed for the API had three strange parameters. "<NoSurname>", "<NoBirthDay>" and "<NoBirthMonth">. Intruged, I first assumed these were optional parameters, that I could verify a identity card by leaving these fields empty, alas, no. If your card has these fields, you need to provide them, which implies: “Are there identitification cards without these fields?!”

Yes. Yes, there are.

Starting with the birthday and birthmonth, there are actually is an intresting article about the subject, mentioning a 76 year old man whose birth month and day is given as 0. This is because, apperantly, prior to 2006, people with unknown birthdays were given the day 0. I also heard of anectodes of people seeing cards without birthdays and months, since the oldest generation sometimes do not know their exact birthdays, as in their days, rural communuties kept time not using the Julian callendar, and not even the older Islamic callender, but used crop cycles, ie: “Born during harvest”. Therefore, these people remained without a set birthday and month, and with only a year.

Sure, but what about cards withotu surnames? Well, First Identity Cards, or documents that were their direct ancestors can be dates to 1928, but, Turkish people did not have a surname (at least in the legal sense) until 1934, which means that people who have died before this time, technically had a valid identification card, but no surnames, I assume that is why the API allows checks without surnames.

All in all, something as simple as an identity check API has intresting historical footnotes in it. Decisions that were perhaps taken for backwards compatibility with older systems result in deeper than expected rabit holes. It was quite a peculiar experince indeed.