There's A Petition To Make The Turkish Province Of Batman Into The Shape Of The "Batman" Logo

The governor of Batman did not respond to a BuzzFeed News request about the petition to reshape his province to look like the superhero's emblem.

By
Hayes Brown
by Hayes Brown

BuzzFeed News Reporter

This is a story about Batman.

Jack Taylor / Getty Images

Well, not quite that Batman, the DC Comics superhero of legend. Not entirely. You may have come here to read all about the Dark Knight, but we have a different Batman under consideration here alongside Bruce Wayne, the billionaire playboy out to avenge the death of his parents.

Welcome to Batman, Turkey!

Afp Contributor / AFP / Getty Images

Which is, in fact, a real place!

Batman is both a city and a province in Turkey, and by all accounts is actually really lovely, in a quaint provincial town kinda way.

Afp Contributor / AFP / Getty Images

The province is apparently named for an old form of weight in Turkey, and it has over 500,000 inhabitants. Neat!

Like, look at these women hard at work in a Batman factory in this 2011 picture.

Umit Bektas / Reuters

And here's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signing a drone at a Batman airbase...for some reason.

Murat Cetinmuhurdar / AP

Just a regular drone, though. Not a Batdrone.

Right now, the borders of Batman Province look like this:

Google Maps

As you can see, it looks nothing like a bat, man or otherwise.

That stunning oversight has prompted a user on Change.org to launch a petition to get the border of the province changed to a more familiar shape.

Change.org / Via change.org

"Batman needs some change! We can start with the border. By changing the border, we can make it more realistic," wrote user Kemal Atakan Kırca.

As of Monday, the petition was fewer than 4,000 names away from its goal of 25,000 signatures.

(BuzzFeed News has reached out to several users on Facebook who share Kırca's name in hopes of talking with him more about this initiative. We will update if he responds.)

BuzzFeed News has reached out to the governor of Batman to see what he thinks about the drive. Warner Bros., which owns DC Comics, declined to comment on the project.

Jack Taylor / Getty Images

This isn't the first time Batman has been in the news for its links to Batman.

Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images

Back in 2008, the then-mayor of the city of Batman sued Warner Bros. and DC comics for using their town's name without permission. (Batman, the character, was created in 1939 by legendary artist Bob Kane, apparently two decades before the city got its modern name.)

"The royalty of the name 'Batman' belongs to us. ... There is only one Batman in the world, " the mayor told the Dogan news agency at the time, as reported by the Turkish outlet Hurriyet Daily News. "The American producers used the name of our city without informing us."

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