What does a lighting pole tender actually cite in each market?

The first table groups the four markets that adopt EN 40 nationally. The prefix matters more than it looks: a tender in Zagreb will not accept a reference to SRPS, and a tender in Belgrade will not accept HRN, even though both point back to the same European text.

The other four markets are not variations on the same theme. They are four separate regimes, and the difference is not cosmetic:

Which of these markets accept CE marking as the answer?

Two of them, without qualification: Croatia and Greece are EU member states, so the CE route is the route. Everywhere else CE is useful evidence rather than the legal basis, and the tender may still ask for something local on top.

This matters for a Turkish manufacturer more than it looks, because CE marking is what lets a single technical file serve several markets. Where CE is not the legal basis, the file still travels – but the covering argument changes from “this product conforms” to “this product was built and tested to the following standards, and here is the evidence”.

What actually changes the pole, market by market?

The standard decides the paperwork. The site decides the pole. Across these eight, five distinct design drivers show up, and they do not follow the standards map at all:

The mistake we see most often is a buyer applying one national standard and one coastal specification to a whole country. Batumi and Tbilisi are not the same job. Basra and Erbil are not the same job.

Where could we not confirm the answer?

Two places, and we would rather say so than write something that reads well and is wrong.

In Kosovo, AKS publishes European standards under the SK EN prefix, but at the time of writing we could not confirm that SK EN 40, SK EN 13201 or SK EN ISO 1461 have been adopted. If you are bidding there, ask the contracting authority to name the designation in writing rather than assuming a national EN 40 exists.

In Serbia, we could not confirm from the agreement text which proof-of-origin form applies under the free trade agreement. Ask your forwarder to name it against Protocol II. What we can say is that the agreement is in force and covers industrial goods.

These two gaps are the reason this page exists as a comparison rather than a claim. Six of the eight we could pin to a named document. Two we could not, and those are exactly the two where a supplier confidently quoting a standard should make you ask where they got it.

What does this mean if you are sourcing poles from Türkiye?

Three things, in order of how much money they save.

Name the designation in the enquiry. Not “EN 40” but “SRPS EN 40-5:2016” or “HRN EN 40-3-1:2013”. A manufacturer who can quote against the exact designation is a manufacturer who has read the tender; one who answers “yes, EN 40” to all eight has not.

Separate the dimensional question from the form question. Height, diameter, wall thickness, arm length, door position and RAL colour are set per project: no new tooling, no minimum order. A change of form needs a die, and a die costs 4,000–50,000 USD depending on part size, carries a 1,000–2,000 piece minimum, and takes four to six weeks to cut. First delivery follows seven to nine weeks after drawing approval; a repeat order on an existing die is three weeks with no minimum and no tooling charge. Most suppliers answer these two as though they were one question, which is how a project ends up paying for a mould it did not need.

Decide the corrosion case per site, not per country. The coastal specification costs more and is worth it on the coast. Applying it inland is money spent on nothing. The full argument is in the coastal lighting poles guide.

What can Artay supply into these markets?

Street lighting poles to 12 m, urban and decorative poles at 3–8 m, and bollard lights at 0.6–1.2 m. Aluminium bodies are cast in EN AC-46000 (AlSi9Cu3) in our own foundry, chromate pre-treated and electrostatically powder coated. Steel columns are cut, folded and hot dip galvanized to EN ISO 1461 to order. Manufacturing is certified to TSE under TS EN 40 for lighting columns and to ISO 9001 for quality management; luminaires are CE marked.

Above 12 m the answer is a high-mast pole and we do not make one. Say so early in a tender rather than late.

Send the tender document, a drawing, a 3D model or a written specification to info@artaylighting.com – and if the tender names a national designation, send that line too. It is the fastest way to a quote that means something.

The eight market guides in full

• Croatia — HRN editions, the bura, and Adriatic corrosion.
• Greece — the ELOT technical specification a tender actually cites, and what changes on an island.
• Moldova — the SM SR route, the 2026 origin change, and a 64-degree annual range.
• Serbia — SRPS designations, CE marking in a non-EU market, and inland sites.
• Georgia — voluntary standards, the free trade agreement, and why Batumi differs from Tbilisi.
• Kosovo — how conformity works, and what we could not confirm.
• Iraq — Specification D-13, 55 °C, and how tenders reach a foreign bidder.
• Kuwait — MEW/S-1, surface temperature, dust and the Gulf coast.

Related guides

• EN 40 lighting column standards — what each part of the series actually covers.
• What a lighting pole costs — mould economics, minimum orders and lead times in full.
• Lighting pole materials — galvanized steel or aluminium, and what happens where they meet.
• OEM and private label lighting poles — producing under a distributor’s own brand.
• Street lighting pole manufacturers in Türkiye — how to compare them, and what none of them publish.

What mounting height belongs in a garden, a park or a landscaped plaza?

Work down from the space, not up from the catalogue. The table below is the ladder we use when a drawing arrives with no heights on it.

Above 12 m the answer is a high-mast pole and we do not make one. Say so early in a tender rather than late.

The two heights that get confused are 1.2 m and 3 m. A bollard lights the surface it stands on and roughly two to three metres of path either side; it cannot light a lawn, a facade or a tree. A 3 m pole lights an area but puts a source in the sightline of anyone walking towards it. If a garden needs both – and most do – they are two separate line items, not one compromise height.

Which standard applies to a garden path?

EN 13201 covers it, through its P classes. The M classes are road surface luminance for motorised traffic; the P classes are maintained illuminance for pedestrian areas, running from P1 at 15 lux down to P6 at 2 lux. A park path, a campus route and a garden walk all sit in that range, and a specification that names a P class is a specification a manufacturer can quote against.

What matters more is what EN 13201 does not contain. None of its class families sets an upward light ratio limit, a colour temperature requirement or any spectral criterion. A luminaire can meet the standard in full and still throw light into a bedroom window, wash the underside of a tree canopy and sit at a colour temperature nobody in a residential garden wants. In road lighting that gap is partly covered by the road authority’s own rules. In a garden there is no road authority, which is why landscape schemes are where the gap actually bites.

The rest of the specification vocabulary is the same as any exterior scheme: EN 40-2 for column dimensions and tolerances, EN 40-3-1 for characteristic loads, EN 40-3-3 for verification by calculation, EN 40-6 for aluminium columns, EN 60598-2-3 for the luminaire, EN ISO 1461 where any part is hot dip galvanized, and CIE 150 for obtrusive light.

Why do garden schemes generate complaints, and what stops them?

Because a garden is surrounded by people who are trying to sleep. A road is not. The same luminaire that is unremarkable on a distributor road becomes the thing a resident telephones about when it is thirty metres from a window.

CIE 150 handles this by classifying the surroundings rather than the fixture. The zone is chosen from where the site is, and it then governs how much light may leave the scheme:

Two practical consequences. First, the same park in an E2 village and an E4 city centre is not the same lighting job, and a specification that does not state the zone is asking the manufacturer to guess. Second, a bollard is inherently better placed than a pole to keep light inside a site, because it is low and its optic looks down – but only if the light source is not visible from a standing eye height. A bollard with an exposed lamp at 1 m is a glare source at exactly the height a person looks.

What colour temperature should a landscape scheme specify?

State it in the order. It is the single most common omission we see, and the one that is impossible to fix after delivery.

The direction of travel in exterior lighting guidance is towards lower blue content. The DarkSky Approved luminaires programme, for example, will not certify a product whose light source exceeds a nominal 3000 K, and excludes colour-tunable products that offer any option above it. Planting also reads differently under different sources: greens and browns hold their colour at warmer temperatures, while cooler light flattens foliage and pushes stonework grey.

None of that makes a single number correct for every site. It makes the number a decision the designer owns and writes down. Send us the colour temperature with the order and we will confirm what we can supply against it before anything is cast.

Why is a garden fixture aluminium and not galvanized steel?

Because of where it stands. Galvanizing protects steel by sacrificing zinc, and the coating on a bollard is within reach of shoes, trolleys, mowers, strimmers and de-icing salt. Damage at that height is not cosmetic; it is the start of a corrosion clock. A die-cast aluminium body has no sacrificial layer to lose, and the chromate pre-treatment and electrostatic powder coating go onto a substrate that does not rust when the coating is scratched.

Our bollard and decorative pole bodies are cast in EN AC-46000 (AlSi9Cu3) in our own foundry. Steel still belongs on the taller columns at the boundary of a landscape, where height and wind load decide the material. The full argument, including which corrosivity category sends you which way, is in the lighting pole materials guide.

Can a landscape range be made to your own design?

Yes, and the answer splits in two – which is the part most suppliers answer as though it were one question.

A dimensional change needs no new mould and carries no minimum order: height, diameter, wall thickness, arm length, door position and RAL colour are all set per project. If a landscape architect wants the same bollard at 900 mm instead of 1,100 mm in a bronze RAL, that is a normal order.

A change of form needs a new mould, and a mould has an economy:

For a single garden this is rarely the right route. For a municipality standardising a park family across a district, or a developer with several phases, the tooling amortises over the second and third order and the range becomes theirs. Our own ancient cities collection is what that looks like when it is done for a catalogue rather than one client.

What do you need to send us to get a quote?

Six things, and a drawing is not one of them if you do not have one yet.

The mounting heights and the quantity at each height. The environmental zone or, failing that, a photograph of the surroundings at night. The P class if the scheme has been calculated, or the path widths if it has not. The colour temperature. The RAL, or a note that it is open. And whether the poles are being set in concrete foundations or onto existing bases – that decides the base detail and it is the change that is most expensive to make late.

Send a drawing, a 3D model, a photograph or a written specification to info@artaylighting.com.

Five mistakes that show up on site

Spacing set from the catalogue photograph. The render shows one unit on a dark path. The scheme has forty. Spacing comes from the P class and the path width, not from how the product looks alone.

One height for the whole site. A garden that needs both path lighting and area lighting gets two heights. Forcing one compromise height under-lights the open ground and over-lights the walker.

The colour temperature left to the supplier. Whatever arrives becomes the standard for every future phase, because matching it later costs more than choosing it now.

Bollards placed where they will be hit. Turning circles, bin routes, mower runs and delivery access. A bollard in a mowing line is a maintenance item forever, whatever it is made of.

No spare stock. Landscape schemes lose units to vehicles and vandalism at a steady rate. Two to three per cent held at handover is cheaper than a repeat order at minimum quantity years later, and it guarantees the match.

Working with Artay on garden and landscape lighting

We are a manufacturer, not a lighting designer. What we are good for is the part between a designed scheme and a delivered one: casting the bodies, cutting and finishing the columns, holding the RAL across phases, and telling you honestly which of your changes needs a mould and which does not.

Bollards run 0.6–1.2 m and decorative poles 3–8 m, cast in EN AC-46000 aluminium in Başakşehir. Steel columns are cut, folded and hot dip galvanized to EN ISO 1461 to order. We are certified to TSE under TS EN 40 for lighting columns and to ISO 9001 for quality management, and we carry CE.

Send a drawing, a 3D model, a photograph or a written specification to info@artaylighting.com.

Related guides

• Bollard lights — the fixture itself: glare, spacing, what belongs in a bollard specification.
• Ancient cities collection — the models named after ancient Anatolian settlements, with the site behind each name.
• Urban lighting: a specifier’s guide — standards, obtrusive light and the decisions that are expensive to reverse.
• Lighting pole materials — galvanized steel or aluminium, and what happens where they meet.
• What a lighting pole costs — mould economics, minimum orders and lead times in full.
• Coastal lighting poles — chloride, chromate pre-treatment and what changes in a seaside specification.