Post offices are mainly small and sometimes hard to find. You need to look for signs showing PTT or, in tourist areas, post office. Post office business hours vary. Main post offices in the centres (called "merkez postanesi")
are always open from Monday to Saturday from 8.00 am to 12.00 noon, and on Sundays from 9.00 am to 7.00 pm. Smaller post offices are open from Monday to Friday from 8.30 am to 12.00 noon and again from 1.00 pm to 5.00 pm. However, this may vary in tourist areas.
For phone calls abroad and inside the country you can dial inside the offices or at outside telephone boxes, but you will need telephone "jetton" (pre-paid telephone cards or coins). They are available in different values depending on where you are phoning to and the time you want to make your phone calls. Jettons and telephone cards are on sale in the post offices.
Don't forget, you need to dial your country code (0044 for the UK and 00353 for the Republic of Ireland) and then leave out the zero of the area code before dialling the number you want.
Today nearly everybody owns a mobile phone. That means that public telephones are not that busy anymore. But please remember that phoning from your home country registered mobile phone from Turkey means you have to be connected from the English network into the Turkish network, and then again from the Turkish network back to the English one and you pay for all this. A huge bill can mount up very quickly. If you need your mobile quite often you should buy a pre-paid Turkish mobile number, which is easy to get and easy to install. All you need is to take your passport to a shop and ask for a Turkish SIM card. All phone calls within Turkey have country codes like we use in Europe. As an example, for the whole area between Alanya and Antalya the code is 0242 followed by the number of the person you wish to speak to.
You can also buy stamps for post cards and letters in the post offices too, but bear in mind that postcards and letters will need more then a week to reach the destination abroad and sometimes getting lost.
Quite often, people go to post offices to change cash into Turkish money. Dont forget that you will have to pay some extra on top of the rate so it might be cheaper to use private exchange offices. A good rule is always compare rates and service charges.
