2013 Turkish local government reorganisation

Municipalities (Turkish: belediyeler) are the basic units of local government in Turkey. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute the population of Turkey was 76,667,864 as of 31 December 2013.^[1] The majority of the population live in settlements with municipalities. The number of municipalities in Turkey was 2,947 in 2009. But in 2013, most of the small town (Turkish: belde) municipalities were merged to district (Turkish: ilçe) municipalities by the Act 6360^[2] which came into effect at the 2014 local elections sharply decreased the number of municipalities to 1,394.