Sending Condolence Flowers to Turkey When the Funeral Is Tomorrow

The call comes in the evening and the funeral is the following midday. That is the situation most people are in when they search for condolence flowers for Turkey from abroad, and it is fundamentally different from a memorial service in London or Dublin that sits ten days out. Islamic practice is burial within roughly twenty-four hours, often the same day. There is no window in which to browse calmly. So logistics come first here and symbolism second.

First: where do they actually go

This is the question most often answered wrongly from a distance. In Turkey, flowers and standing wreaths usually do not go to the graveside. They go to the courtyard of the mosque where the funeral prayer, the cenaze namazı, is held. They stand there during the prayer, visible to everyone who comes. The second option is the family's home in the days that follow, the taziye period, when visitors are received. If you can obtain only one piece of information before ordering, make it this one: which mosque, and at what time.

Ask a family member who is there. One sentence does it. If you would rather not ask, or you cannot reach anyone, deliver to the family's home address. That is never wrong, only later.

The clock is the real constraint

Istanbul is three hours ahead of the UK and two ahead of Central Europe. A funeral prayer at one in the afternoon in Istanbul is ten in the morning in London, and a prayer held after midday prayers means the flowers need to be standing in the courtyard by mid-morning. If you order in your own evening, you are in practice ordering for the next morning. Say when you order that this is a funeral and when the prayer is. It changes the order in which a florist works.

What is sent

White is the expected colour: lilies, white roses, white carnations, usually in large standing arrangements rather than bouquets someone has to hold. For a mosque courtyard, size is appropriate, the piece stands on its own. For the family's home an arrangement already in a container is more practical, because nobody in a full house has time to find a vase. Our sympathy collection is built for both cases.

What does not translate are the small mixed bouquets in pink and peach that read as tasteful restraint in Britain. Here they read as a get-well gift. And chrysanthemums, the cemetery flower across much of Europe, carry that same graveside association in Turkey, our chrysanthemum guide goes into it.

The ribbon, and what goes on it

Turkish funeral arrangements almost always carry a sash with the sender's name. That is not a formality, it is how the family later knows who was there. Write your full name, or your company name for a business. The usual phrases are short: "Başınız sağolsun" is the standard condolence, "Allah rahmet eylesin" the religious form, "Mekânı cennet olsun" a warmer variant. One of those lines plus your name is complete. Longer English sentences translate poorly into this setting.

If you cannot be there

This is the common case and explicitly not a shortcoming. Flowers standing in the courtyard while the prayer is said are a recognised form of presence in Turkey. Many families abroad also send something to the house during the taziye days, because that is where the real stream of visitors happens, and telephone on the third or fourth day once things have quietened.

If you want the cultural background rather than the procedure, that is in our guide to sympathy customs in Turkey. For the general route for ordering from abroad we have a dedicated page: send flowers to Turkey.