Türkiye's ports moved 279.1 million tons of cargo in the first half of 2026, up 1.5% on the same six months a year earlier. That number carries more weight than the small percentage suggests, because it covers the exact window in which the Strait of Hormuz was shut.
The US and Israeli air war on Iran opened on 28 February. Iran declared the strait closed around 4 March, and it has stayed closed since. So the whole of the first half, January through June, sits inside the blockade rather than before it. When Turkish officials talk about trade holding up, they are describing performance measured through the shock, not a calm stretch that came before it.
Container traffic tells the same story. Terminals handled 7.02 million TEU over the six months, up 1.3%, with June alone bringing in about 46.9 million tons of cargo. Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu released the figures from the Directorate General of Maritime Affairs and framed the growth as coming "despite the Strait of Hormuz tensions." Kocaeli, Aliağa and İskenderun led the volumes in June. These are the government's own port statistics, so read them as official data, correctly dated, rather than an independent audit.
The more interesting read comes from the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. In an analysis posted to its blog on 6 July, the bank found that the second-quarter foreign-trade balance actually improved, even as energy import costs jumped. Calendar-adjusted energy imports rose 32.4% year-on-year, driven by an average Brent price up 55.2% and natural gas up 28.2%. Imports outside energy fell, so the whole increase came from the fuel bill.
Strong exports covered the gap. And the closure did something the ministry did not have to spin: with Far East delivery times stretched and freight and insurance costs higher, some supply-chain orders shifted toward Türkiye. The bank concluded that the war's upside risks to the current-account deficit had diminished compared with a few months earlier. It did not attach a second-quarter current-account figure to that judgment, and neither will I.
The regional lines fill in the picture. Southeast Anatolian exporters, grouped under GAİB, sent $5.87 billion abroad in the first half, up 2.3% by value and 9.6% by volume, reaching 198 countries with Iraq the single largest buyer at $1.1 billion. Kocaeli, the industrial belt on the Gulf of İzmit, exported $12.75 billion, up 9.5%, holding second place among Türkiye's provinces behind Istanbul. Automotive and chemicals carried the bulk of it.
None of this makes the war a good thing for the region, and the energy bill is real money. But the question this quarter was whether a strait closure on Türkiye's doorstep would choke its trade. Six months of port tonnage, the central bank's own arithmetic, and the provincial export books answer no. Daily Sabah and Hürriyet Daily News carried the same central-bank finding in English, and the numbers line up across the Turkish and Western relays.