Ziraat Bankası Brand Guidelines: 1863 Homeland Funds, an 1888 Charter & a Redrawn Logo

Village money kept in wooden cases.

Ziraat Bankası, whose name means “Agriculture Bank,” dates its story to 20 November 1863. Its own history page says the Homeland Funds (Memleket Sandıkları) were founded that day by Midhat Pasha, then governor of the Ottoman province of Niš, in the town of Pirot. English Wikipedia names Midhat Pasha as the bank’s founder and says the funds were the first agricultural financial institution set up by the state and run with a state guarantee.

The name came from the furniture. The bank says money collected from villagers was kept in wooden cases — sandık is Turkish for “case” — and lent to farmers to be repaid at harvest, with the journals, ledgers and cash locked inside. Each fund was run by four custodians chosen by the villagers taking part. Regulations in 1867 spread the funds across the empire, and in 1883 they were replaced by “Benefit Funds” (Menafi Sandıkları) under closer central control.

In 1888 the Benefit Funds were turned into branches of a new institution, Ziraat Bankası, with its head office in Istanbul. The bank’s page gives 15 August 1888 as the founding date in its narrative and 28 August for the regulations in its timeline; both point to the same year. A 1916 law restated its purpose as serving farmers and the development of agriculture.

The Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 split the organisation for a time. English Wikipedia says Greek forces opened a separate Ziraat management centre in İzmir, while the Grand National Assembly in Ankara put the bank’s Ankara branch in charge of the branches and funds under its control. The İzmir organisation rejoined Ankara on 9 September 1922 and Istanbul followed on 23 October; a 1924 budget law made the bank a joint-stock company, the bank says.

Tractors, cards and a cup final.

For most of the twentieth century the bank’s work was farm credit. English Wikipedia, citing a 2016 paper in The Journal of Peasant Studies, says Ziraat played an important role from the 1930s in financing the mechanisation of Turkish agriculture. The bank’s own account adds that it was a partner in the Turkish-American company that made the country’s first domestic tractor, and that it lent for irrigation, orchards, dairy herds, beekeeping and silkworm breeding.

Its retail side came later. The bank’s timeline puts its first consumer loans and first credit cards in 1989, a school of banking in the same year, and self-service machines from 1990. Abroad, it opened agencies in Hamburg, London and New York from the 1970s and, in 1993, banks in Moscow, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which Wikipedia also records; ZiraatBank BH in Sarajevo followed in 1996.

The structure changed after 2000. A law of 25 November 2000 made Ziraat a joint-stock company again, and after the February 2001 crisis the public banks were restructured under a joint board. In 2001 Emlak Bankası was merged into Ziraat, both English Wikipedia and the bank say. Ziraat Participation Bank, an interest-free arm, began operating in 2015, according to the bank.

Ownership is a matter of record. Daily Sabah reported in February 2022 that the Türkiye Wealth Fund wholly owns Ziraat Bank, and that the fund was paying for a capital increase that year. Wikipedia also lists the fund as owner.

The name travels well beyond branches. The bank says it took the naming rights to the Turkish Cup in 2010, and that its Ziraat Bankkart volleyball team won the 2020–21 Efeler League. It opened what it calls Türkiye’s first banking museum in 1981, and reopened it on 20 November 2019 after restoring the historic Ulus headquarters building in Ankara, alongside an art gallery in the city’s Çukurambar district.

How Turkish banks present themselves.

Turkish banks tend to present themselves through bold, simple wordmarks and one dominant colour. Across the country’s large lenders the palettes run through greens, reds, blues and purples, and the names keep their Turkish letters — the dotted capital İ, the ş, the ı and the ğ — on logos, apps and branch signs, so a typeface that handles those diacritics cleanly belongs in any design brief for the sector.

Advertising is a large part of how these brands are known at home. Mascots, recurring characters and campaigns led by well-known actors and athletes appear across the sector, alongside photography of branches, city streets and Istanbul itself. On their websites the banks arrange themselves around everyday tasks: accounts, loans, credit cards and loyalty programmes, and mobile apps that sit at the front of most pages.

Sponsorship and culture extend the identity. Turkish banks sponsor football, concerts and festivals, and some run publishers, galleries, museums or art collections under their own names; İşbank’s publishing house and painting collection, and the SALT institution that grew out of Garanti BBVA’s Ottoman Bank archive, are two documented examples covered in this series.

The banks also publish a great deal of formal material. Listed lenders produce annual and integrated reports, sustainability reports and investor presentations in Turkish and English. This series sets out what can be checked about each bank — when and where it was founded, who owns it and how its name has changed — and marks clearly what rests only on a bank’s own word.

A logo redrawn to be read from the street.

The bank’s identity is usually seen at street level, on branch signs, cards and machines. In November 2024 it described its most recent change in a press statement reported by Paratic: the logo had been enlarged and given a clearer, more modern design so that it reads more easily on branch signs and in other media. The statement said existing signs, printed matter and visual materials would stay in use, with replacement planned around branch refurbishments and the working life of each item; it said only 24 signs had been changed so far, during refurbishments that were needed anyway.

The bank’s history is part of how it talks about itself. In 2013 it marked its 150th anniversary, counting from the 1863 funds, and its timeline lists a digital exhibition of the Ziraat Bank Art Collection, “Light and Color,” in Istanbul in 2018 and an online tour of its museum. It also cites outside rankings: it says Brand Finance named it Türkiye’s most valuable banking brand in 2019, and that the “Türkiye’s Lovemarks” survey named it the country’s most loved bank five years running by 2020.

English Wikipedia says that in 2023 Ziraat moved its headquarters to the Istanbul Finance Center, into two towers of 40 and 46 floors designed by the New York architects Kohn Pedersen Fox, while the Ulus building in Ankara keeps the museum.

For a design guide, Ziraat Bankası shows how a very old public institution can keep its name and colours while redrawing its mark for legibility, and change signs as branches are refitted rather than all at once. Compare VakıfBank, another state-owned Turkish bank, and İşbank. For this guide we use a deep red, a wheat tone, linen and charcoal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ziraat Bankası’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.