Do we like Tarkan?
Our score: 7 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up and there is real giving on record, but the English-language record on his views is thin.
Tarkan is Turkey's pop megastar. He was born in Germany in 1972 to immigrant worker parents, and the family moved back to Turkey in 1986, settling in Karamürsel. He studied at a Turkish classical music academy, moved to Istanbul at 16 and released his debut album in 1992.
The breakthrough came with the 1994 hit made with Sezen Aksu, then 1999's Ölürüm Sana, which sold 4.5 million copies at home. Then came “Şımarık”, which went by the name “Kiss Kiss” across Europe. He had a rough patch after a live TV gaffe, headed to New York to learn English, and came back by singing classical Turkish songs.
The scrapes on the record are tame. In 2001 his music video of him kissing a model drew viewer complaints that it went too far, and Turkey's media watchdog weighed a ban on broadcasting it. He also had a long rights dispute with Sezen Aksu over “Şımarık”. That's racy-video and paperwork territory, not a pattern of hurting anyone.
On the harm check, nothing nasty came up in the sources we could read: no attacks on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or science, and no conspiracy slide. The flip side is that he isn't a vocal ally either, and most of the coverage of him is in Turkish. After the 2023 earthquakes he posted that the people running to help were being targeted instead of those responsible for the deaths.
His 2026 news is all music, with nothing fresh on the controversy front. He returned to Istanbul stages after seven years for a run of sold-out January shows, with guests including Sibel Can, Ata Demirer, Ajda Pekkan and Cem Yılmaz joining on different nights. A Daily Sabah writer who went called it a communal, healing sort of night.
On the good stuff, Darüşşafaka, a long-running educational foundation, announced a donation from Tarkan's 2022 İzmir concert fee. Diken also reported that the fee was going to a volunteering foundation and to Mor Çatı, a women's shelter foundation, though those two weren't officially confirmed at the time. Giving a gig's fee to a women's shelter is the kind of quiet thing we like to see.