Canal Istanbul in 2026, the Crazy Project of Erdoğan Is Back on Paper but Still Not in the Ground

On 13 October 2026 Turkey's transport ministry said it wanted to put Canal Istanbul out to tender and start building "as soon as possible". It gave no date, no cost and no word on who would pay. The ministry was answering written questions from the opposition daily BirGün, and its answer amounted to this: the surveys are done, zoning plans are being drawn up in stages, road designs along the route have begun, and nobody has dug the canal.

That has been the state of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's favourite megaproject for most of the fifteen years since he announced it. In January 2026 the government's own public investment programme gave it 10,000 lira for the year, about 200 dollars, filed under "connection roads". You can't build a canal for that. You can keep a line item alive.

Photo: Dominik Krebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The plan

Erdoğan unveiled the canal in 2011, when he was still prime minister, and called it his "crazy project". The idea is a second, artificial Bosporus about 45 kilometres long on Istanbul's European side, running from the Küçükçekmece lagoon on the Sea of Marmara north through Avcılar, Başakşehir and Arnavutköy to the Black Sea. Plans include six bridges and two new cities with about 500,000 homes along the banks. Transport Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu has put the cost at 15 to 20 billion dollars, before the new towns and their infrastructure.

The government's case is safety. The Bosporus is narrow and twisting, about 110 ships a day pass it, and a large share of what they carry is dangerous cargo (see traffic and transit rules). Shift tankers to a canal, the argument goes, and the risk to Istanbul falls. The trouble is that traffic has been falling for twenty years, from 56,606 ships in 2007 to around 40,000 now, and under the Montreux Convention merchant ships can use the Bosporus for free. No shipowner can be made to pay to use a canal when the natural strait next to it costs only a lighthouse fee.

What has actually been built

In June 2021 Erdoğan held a groundbreaking ceremony for a bridge over the Sazlıdere reservoir, on the canal's route. Since then the visible work along the line has been roads, bridges and housing, much of it by the state housing agency TOKİ, not excavation. In April 2025 Environment Minister Murat Kurum said the canal was "not on our agenda". The next day Uraloğlu said the government had not given it up and would build it "at the right time, with the right credit and finance". Read together, the two statements say the money isn't there.

The route has been good business anyway. Farmland and forest along the corridor have been opened to development, and Istanbul's elected municipality, which supplies the city's water, has objected to the housing going up around Sazlıdere. Its mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, has accused the government of speeding up construction along the route since he was jailed.

The objections

The strongest case against the canal is water. Sazlıdere is one of Istanbul's reservoirs, and the canal would cut through it. A 2025 report signed by 21 experts warned that the project would make the reservoir unusable, threaten supply from Lake Terkos, the city's oldest major source, and wreck the ecosystem of the Küçükçekmece lagoon. Scientists have also warned about salt water entering the aquifers and about changing the delicate two-layer flow between the Black Sea and the Marmara.

The second objection is strategic. A canal built by Turkey might fall outside the 1936 convention, which regulates the natural straits, and nobody can say with confidence what rules would apply to warships using it. When more than a hundred retired admirals raised that question in an open letter in April 2021, Erdoğan said the letter had implications of a coup, and ten of them were detained.

The third is political. İmamoğlu ran Istanbul's municipality on the slogan "either the canal or Istanbul" and fought the project in the planning courts. In March 2025 he was arrested on corruption charges he denies and has been in prison since. Opposition leader Özgür Özel has linked his jailing directly to reviving the canal. The October 2026 tender announcement came with the city's elected mayor behind bars.

Who would pay

No Gulf fund, Chinese lender or Western bank has publicly signed up. Turkey's own finances can't carry it: inflation is still high, the lira has lost most of its value in a decade, and the government spent heavily on rebuilding after the February 2023 earthquakes. A canal that shipowners have no reason to use would have to be paid for by Turkish taxpayers, through state guarantees of the kind that already cover Istanbul's third airport and the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge.

That may be the real point. The canal has been more useful to Erdoğan as a promise, and as a property map, than it would ever be as a waterway.