square_foot Land Area Converter (Acres, Hectares) star

How It's Calculated

Land-area conversion is simple multiplication by a fixed factor: 1 dunam (dönüm) = 1,000 m² = 0.1 hectare = 0.2471 acre. Say a village land registry lists a field as "4 dönüm, 300 m²" — that means 4 × 1,000 + 300 = 4,300 m², or 0.43 hectares, or about 1.063 acres. Enter any one figure into the calculator and every other unit updates from that same base measurement in square meters.

The modern dunam is a 20th-century standardization. Historically, the Ottoman dönüm was a variable local unit — commonly cited between roughly 900 and 1,600 m² depending on the region — because it was derived from the local arşın (a traditional cubit-length unit) rather than a fixed metric distance, so each province effectively had its own dönüm. The Republic of Turkey fixed the dönüm at exactly 1,000 m² (equal to the metric dekar) to standardize land registry and taxation, and that is the value used everywhere today, including this converter.

What to Know

• Old title deeds can be misleading. A pre-Republic or informally inherited deed that states an area "in dönüm" may reflect the old regional value, not the modern 1,000 m² figure — always prefer the m² number from a current cadastral (tapu/kadastro) record when one exists.
• Dunam, decare and dönüm are the same thing today. "Dönüm" is the everyday Turkish word, "dekar" is its scientific/official synonym, and "dunam" is the term used in English, Balkan and Middle Eastern contexts — all equal 1,000 m².
• Greece's stremma looks identical but isn't historically the same unit. The Greek stremma is also exactly 1,000 m², yet it was introduced directly as a modern metric unit rather than descending from the Ottoman arşın-based dönüm the way the Turkish dekar does — the equivalence today is a coincidence of two separate standardizations, not shared ancestry.
• The dunam remains the everyday unit for agricultural land across Türkiye, Greece, Bulgaria and other former Ottoman territories, even though most legal instruments now record area in square meters or hectares.
• Smaller traditional subdivisions still surface in older Turkish documents too — an evlek, a quarter of a dönüm (250 m²), occasionally appears in rural deeds and everyday speech in some regions, so it is worth recognizing even though it isn't part of the metric system.