Yaşar

From a school orchestra in Adana to the bars of Istanbul

Yaşar was born Yaşar Günaçgün on 5 April 1970 in Adana, the southern Turkish city at the heart of the Çukurova plain, to Mustafa Erdal and Mukaddes Leyla Günaçgün. He went through İsmet İnönü Primary School and Adana Special New High School, where he played in the school orchestra. His first appearance on a stage came in November 1985, during the school's Teachers' Day celebrations.

In 1987 he moved to Istanbul to study business at Marmara University, and it was there that the two halves of his later career took shape at the same time. He sang regularly at Moda Han Bar while he was a student and began writing poetry. After his first degree he took a master's in international finance at Istanbul University, and in 1991 he put together a small band and played in Mersin, the port city down the coast from his home town. The finance qualification never became a job. The bar circuit did.

Divane and the albums that followed

The debut album, Divane, arrived in September 1996 and went gold. Its songs are still the spine of his repertoire: on Apple Music today, four of his ten most-played tracks come from that one record, including Kumralım, the title track, Kör Bıçak and O'nun Vedası. In 1997 he took Best Debut by a Male Artist at the Kral TV Video Music Awards, the closest thing Turkish pop then had to an industry prize.

The follow-ups came at a steady pace. Esirinim in 1998 produced Kuşlar and Sebepsiz Fırtına, Masal in 2001 gave him Acıtmıyor Sevdan and the title song, and after a nationwide tour he released Sevdiğim Şarkılar in January 2003 and Hatırla in May 2005. The commercial peak was Sevda Sinemalarda in 2006, which put several songs into Turkey's official chart: Hayırdır İnşallah reached number one, the title track reached three, Cezayir Menekşesi seven and Ebruli ten.

The records were spread across labels, with Topkapı, Lirik and Tempo all involved in the first decade before he settled at Seyhan Müzik in 2007, where he has stayed. The most recent full-length before the current one was Şehir Yalnızlığı in 2017, whose single Nara remains one of his most-streamed songs.

What holds the catalogue together is the register. The Apple Music editorial line describes the material as romantic ballads, and that is accurate: mid-tempo, string-led arrangements built around a warm, slightly worn baritone that leans on the lyric rather than the vocal run. He has never chased dance-pop or the arabesque revival, and the audience that found him in the late 1990s has, on the evidence of the touring schedule, mostly stayed.

Poet, columnist, radio host, occasional actor

Yaşar has always run a literary career alongside the musical one. He published a poetry collection, Yalnızlık Dört Bin Perde, in August 2003, a second, Kuş Ökseleri, in January 2013, and the same year a story collection, Gelen Yolcu, released with his own narration.

He wrote for Kral magazine in 2007 and for KAFA between 2014 and 2021, and presented Her Dem Yaşar on TRT FM across 2011 and 2012. There were film roles too, in Yahşi Cazibe in 2010 and Arkadaşım Hoş Geldin in 2014. He married Merve Oğuz on 28 May 2011 and the couple have a son, Kerim. None of this is a sideline in the sense of a hobby: the poems and the lyrics share a vocabulary, and the between-song talk at his concerts draws on the same well.

Deniz Şarkıları and the 2026 singles

The current album is Deniz Şarkıları, released on 6 December 2024 through Seyhan Müzik. It runs to thirteen tracks, eleven new songs plus two remixes, and is unusual in that every lyric and melody was written by one person, the composer Deniz Özçelik, with all arrangements by Mehmethan Dişbudak. The lead single was Merhaba, which came with an animated video directed by Evren Mine Tan. Söz Müzik counted it as his eleventh studio album and noted that, on top of his own records, he has appeared as a guest vocalist on more than forty project albums. A stand-alone single, Nerdesin, had preceded the album earlier in 2024.

In 2025 the only new title was a feature, Bu Gece İstanbul'da, on which he is the credited guest. The pace picked up in 2026. Hep Böyle Kal (Talu Şarkıları) was released on 24 April 2026, a four-minute single carrying a Dokuz Sekiz Müzik copyright rather than his usual label. The parenthetical marks it as part of a Talu songbook series: the song exists in an earlier recording by Kürşat Başar with Erol Evgin and Zeynep Talu. Then on 31 July 2026 came Babalar Gibi, a single with the producer Ozan Doğulu, released with an official video on Doğulu's channel. Two singles in a year is, for an artist who spent most of the 2010s releasing sparingly, a busy stretch.

His standing, then, is that of a heritage act still working: no chart contention in 2026, but a catalogue that streams, a label that keeps releasing him and promoters that keep booking him. The Turkish ticketing aggregator Konserlist has logged two hundred of his concerts and lists an average ticket price across current dates of a little over 1,600 lira.

On the road in 2026

The 2026 touring year has been organised with Jolly Joker, the venue chain whose rooms he has played for years. The promoter's own gallery page shows past dates at Harbiye Açık Hava, Istanbul's open-air amphitheatre, and at the Kartal, Vadistanbul and Bursa rooms. This year's run has been sold under the banner Yaşar Türkiye Turu 2026, and the calendar has moved through the country in stages: Kayseri's Erciyes Kültür Merkezi on 28 January, Jolly Joker Ankara on 10 April, and the Jolly Joker open-air season in Antalya on 19 June.

The autumn is concentrated on Istanbul. Konserlist lists JJ Arena on 18 September, Jolly Joker Atakent Tema on 16 October, Jolly Joker Kartal İstMarina on 24 October, Jolly Joker Vadistanbul on 7 November and a return to JJ Arena on 20 November. The two Arena dates are standing shows at 1,254 lira; Kartal and Vadistanbul are seated at 1,710 and 1,995 lira respectively.

In between comes the one date outside Turkey: Islington Assembly Hall in London on Wednesday 7 October 2026, a 7pm start, marketed to the city's Turkish-speaking community. The listings describe it as part of a European run and bill it as a night built around the '90s songs, naming Kumralım, Birtanem and Divane. It is a 14-plus show, with under-16s admitted only with an adult, and tickets on the resale and primary sites start a little under £54.

What the show is like now

The concerts are a singer-and-band affair with no theatrical production to speak of. The promoter's copy for the 2026 tour sells them on three things: the songs people already know, a strong voice and a candour on stage. That copy names Divane, Kuşlar, Birtanem, Aldanırım and Sevda Sinemalarda as the numbers the tour is built around, and calls the evenings a shared memory brought to the stage rather than a music night. Allowing for the sales pitch, that is a fair description of what these rooms are for: a mostly forty-and-over crowd singing the choruses back at a man who has been playing to them since they were students.

Jolly Joker's artist page describes him as someone who conveys emotion the same way on stage as on record, and that is the appeal rather than any surprise. The venues themselves vary: the Arena and Atakent dates are standing club shows, while Kartal İstMarina and Vadistanbul are seated. No support act is named on any of the 2026 listings, and no independent review of a 2026 date was found in the course of this research, so set length and the exact running order are not verified here. What the listings do confirm is that the new material from Deniz Şarkıları and the two 2026 singles shares the bill with a repertoire that has barely changed shape since Sevda Sinemalarda.