When Nigel and Peggy Parish, two pensioners from Kidderminster, decided to build a beautiful villa on the beach in Turkey, they never imagined that their search for a dream home could turn into a nightmare. But their Kafkaesque tangle with Turkish bureaucracy has left them facing eviction from a house they love.

In 1993, Nigel took early retirement from his job as head of UK operations at an American bank in Birmingham. He and his wife Peggy began looking for a place to buy and, after spending two holidays in Turkey in the mid-1990s, fell in love with Oren, a resort just outside Bodrum on the Mediterranean coast.

In 1997 the Parishes bought three adjacent plots of land, covering nearly 800 square metres, for about £16,000. But when they went to the local land registry office to collect the title deeds, they were told Oren was in a “military security zone” and that foreigners were forbidden from owning property there.

There are no military bases in Oren and it is difficult to see what strategic purpose the town could serve. The restrictions are generally believed to have been designed to prevent Greeks expelled from Turkey in the early 20th century from returning and buying land. The Parishes were advised to register the title deeds in the name of a Turkish friend and apply to the government to have the security restrictions on their plot lifted so it could be transferred to their name.

In July 1997, the Parishes were given the title deeds to the three plots in the name of a Turkish friend, Rahmi Kiyici. In September that year, they received a single title deed in his name, unifying the three plots. They were given a building permit and over the next 12 months spent £35,000 constructing a two-storey house.

In September 1998, after selling everything they owned in the UK, the Parishes moved in and received a new title deed from the Turkish authorities, again in Kiyici’s name but this time recording that there was a residential building on the land.

In 2000, the Parishes were told that their application for a dispensation on the security restrictions on their land had been rejected. In October that year, they received a letter addressed to Kiyici telling them that one of the original three plots of land belonged to the Turkish treasury. They were taken to court. Even though they had the title deeds and employed a Turkish lawyer, the judge ruled the land belonged to the Turkish state and their title deed was cancelled. In June 2003, another letter arrived, claiming that the second of the three plots of land was owned by the forestry commission.

“This time we decided to defend ourselves rather than waste money on a lawyer,” says Nigel, 61. “We went to several court hearings and then the judge said that they would come to inspect the property. So one day in April 2004 they held a hearing in our garden, with the girl who was the clerk to the court sitting on a stool under an olive tree with her typewriter. The judge had brought four experts to inspect the property but two of them spent nearly all the time up some almond trees picking nuts.

“We explained everything to the judge. At the end she said that she sympathised with us and told us not to bother to attend the final hearing as she had been told that the forestry commission was going to withdraw its application. But when, a couple of months later, we called in at the court to collect a copy of the judgment we were told that the commission hadn’t withdrawn its application and that, in our absence, the judge had ruled against us and cancelled our title deeds.” To add insult to injury, the court ordered the Parishes to pay £300 in costs and fees.

To date, neither the Turkish treasury nor the forestry commission has attempted physically to reclaim the land. The Parishes’ house is on the one plot of land still registered in their friend’s name. But this potentially raises another problem.

“Rahmi is 64 and in good health,” says Nigel. “But if something were to happen to him, then, under Turkish law, the land and the house would pass automatically to his son. Rahmi has very little contact with him. We don’t know what he would do. We could lose everything.”

Omer Yetgin, head of the Bodrum Estate Agents Association, says that in the past 12 years more than 1,000 foreigners, over 600 of them Britons, have bought land registered in their own names in areas outside military security zones in the Bodrum region. “But we think that about the same number of foreigners have bought land and registered it in a Turkish friend’s name to try to get around the legal restrictions.”

The Parishes’ plight has attracted sympathy in Turkey. “We Turks have a strange fear,” says Mehmet Ali Birand, a columnist with the newspaper Posta. “While the rest of the world tries to attract foreign investment and invite foreigners to buy property, we are trying to keep them away. I am sure the Parishes regret ever making Turkey their second home.”

Nigel is more bemused than bitter. “If it was illegal, then how did the land registry office give us the title deeds on three occasions?” he says. “We love it here. I just don’t understand the system.”

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