Ayşegül Aldinç

Cihangir, ceramics and a teacher's wage

Ayşegül Aldinç was born in Istanbul on 28 September 1957, the daughter of Orhan Aldinç, a journalist and sports writer, and Süheyla Aldinç, who taught painting. She grew up in Cihangir, moved through several schools across the city, finished her secondary education at the Sultanahmet art school and then took a degree in ceramics at the Tatbiki Fine Arts Academy — the department that is now part of Marmara University's faculty of fine arts.

Her first wages came from teaching rather than singing: art at the Anafartalar middle school and music at the Akaretler middle school in Istanbul. After that came six years designing at the Yıldız Porcelain Factory. A record existed before any of that work ended — the 1978 single "Hastane / Yorgun ve Mutlu", cut with Mehmet Teoman, whom she married in 1979 and separated from within months — but she only moved to singing full time in 1985, working the gazino circuit.

She tends to date the beginning further back than any of this. From the stage she has said she started singing at nine, and that her first microphone was built out of the lamp from her mother's sewing machine.

Dublin, 1981, and the deal that got her there

Aldinç entered the TRT heats that selected Turkey's Eurovision entry and went to the 1981 contest in Dublin as part of Modern Folk Üçlüsü, performing "Dönme Dolap". The song finished eighteenth.

In an account published on 23 February 2026 she filled in how the booking actually happened. In the same heats she had been singing other people's entries for the jury — Ajda Pekkan's "Bir Dünya Ver Bana" and Nükhet Duru's "İstanbul İstanbul". Modern Folk Üçlüsü proposed a straight swap: she would sing on their song and they would sing on hers, on the reasoning that it improved both sets of odds. She came first in the preliminary round and the trio third, and the trio went to Dublin with her in it.

The same interview covered how the early records were paid for. She was not working from family money, she said, and nobody made the album for her.

"Kara Sevda" and five albums either side of it

Her first solo album, "...Ve Ayşegül Aldinç", arrived in 1988 with Aysel Gürel, Timur Selçuk and Barış Manço behind it. The song that moved her from a gazino bill into the record market was "Kara Sevda". Five more studio albums followed over the next three decades: "Benden Söylemesi" (1991), "Alev Alev" (1993), "Söze Ne Hacet" (1996) and "Nefes" (2000), then a sixteen-year gap before "Sek'iz" in 2016.

Singles carried the catalogue through the quieter stretches — "O Kız" in 2010, "Li Lal Lal La La" in 2011, "Bir Tek Gördüğüm" in 2015. Her most recent recordings are two singles from 2025, "Dilber", subtitled "Yıllar Sonra: Hümeyra", and "Bu Akşam Gün Batarken Gel", subtitled "Kadının Türküsü II". The İstanbul Eğitim ve Kültür Vakfı named her best female singer in 1990.

The other half of the CV

The acting has run in parallel, not as a sideline. She first appeared on screen in the TRT production "Acımak" in 1985, then in "Katırcılar" (1987) and "Kara Sevda" (1989), which shares its title with her hit. For "Gerilla" (1994) she took the best actress award at the Adana Altın Koza film festival in 1995.

On television she appeared in "Aziz Ahmet" (1994) and "Sultan Makamı" (2003), and in the comedy "Pis Yedili" across its run from 2011 to 2014. Her filmography runs to roughly ten features and eleven series, spread across TRT, Star TV, ATV, Kanal D and Show TV, and in Turkey she is recognised about equally for the singing and the screen work.

2026: a book, and a row about duets

The most substantial recent piece of work is not a record. "Velhasılıkelâm", published by Üçüncü Göz, an imprint of Inkılap Kitabevi, and reviewed on 9 September 2026, collects more than seventy short pieces written between 5 November 2023 and 24 May 2026. The material moves between theatre backstages, childhood and social-media habits, and the prose deliberately sets archaic Turkish against current slang — "bahusus" and "mütemadiyen" in the same sentence as "fomo" and "layt". Names from Turkish entertainment run through it, among them Emel Sayın, Tarık Akan and Bülent Ersoy, alongside Nâzım Hikmet and Samuel Beckett. She writes the pieces on her phone's notepad rather than a computer, and has said she likes finding one thing while looking for another.

She also drew a public argument in February. Taking questions at an event on 24 February 2026, she said she would have to be forgotten before she would record a duet with a rapper, placing herself as an artist of the 1990s with no need for that route back into circulation. The remark split comment online and was picked up across the Turkish entertainment press.

Her own framing of the year came a couple of months earlier. In a letter to 2026 published on 30 December 2025, she skipped personal requests and asked the incoming year for "ruh sağlığı" and "kafa sağlamlığı" — mental health and a sound head — noting that the pomegranate-smashing and midnight grape-eating of previous new years had not delivered.

On stage now

The clearest recent record of what she does live is the Fişekhane show on 14 February 2025, billed as "Ayşegül Aldinç ile Yalnızlar Gecesi". It ran about two hours and took in a dozen or so songs: "Dönmem Sana", "Beni Hatırla", "Yolun Başı", "Alimallah", "O Kız", "Durum Leyla", "Yeniler", "Alev Alev", "Gözlerin Su Yeşili", "Kara Sevda" and "Hayır". She worked with a five-piece band — Tolga Kılıç, Eser Ünsalan, Evrim Aslan, Arıkan Sırakaya and Onur Çalışkan — and Gamze Arsal on backing vocals. Between songs she talked: the nine-year-old starting out, the microphone made from the sewing-machine lamp, and a remark that she had broken her usual rule about what she wears to perform.

She returns to the same room on 23 October 2026, on Fişekhane's main stage at 20:30, with the running time listed at 120 minutes. The date was announced in the venue's October programme on 1 October 2026, and is the only date currently on sale; tickets start at 1,784 lira through Biletinial, which is the single platform carrying it. No support act is listed, and the room's main stage is otherwise given over to theatre that month, including "Murder on the Orient Express" and "The Taming of the Shrew". Press coverage of the February 2025 night was descriptive rather than critical, reporting a full room and strong advance interest rather than issuing a verdict.