The Concerts I’ve Been To Lately - Deep Purple, Mor ve Ötesi and Local Bands

Hello everyone,

I hope you’re all healthy and good.

The summer has finally come and I could feel its joy even with the amazing concerts that have been happening since mid-May.

Starting from May, a lot of epic concerts have been taking place here in Istanbul and the best ones are yet to come. Still, even within a month, I was amazed at how many fantastic concerts happened and I was sometimes confused about which one to go to as there were a lot!!

To be honest, I didn’t know about most of the concerts as I’ve been mostly busy with work. I attended most of the concerts spontaneously. I attended some of them for free taking the tickets of my friends who couldn’t make it to the concerts. Some of them were just spontaneous last-minute decisions.

1- Deep Purple
I assume a lot of you know about this legendary rock band. For those who don’t know, it’s an English band established in 1968 and that is a pioneer of hard rock and heavy metal. Water, Highway Star, Burn, Child in Time, Soldier of Fortune, Hurricane, and Perfect Strangers are some of their most famous songs.

They came to Istanbul for their ‘goodbye tour’. They are a quite old band with this tour, they are saying goodbye to their fans all over the world, so it was a very special concert.

Normally, the price for the tickets was very expensive but I was lucky to attend it for free as two of my friends couldn’t make it to the concert and gave the ticket to me and my friend.

We were very close to the stage and it was an incredible experience to watch these legendary musicians at such a close distance and feel the excitement together with the crowd.

2- Mor ve Ötesi

Mor ve Ötesi is one of the best and most famous rock bands in Turkey. They even represented Turkey in Eurovision 2008 with the song, ‘Deli’. They have a huge fanbase in Turkey so this concert was quite an event. Anyone I know in Istanbul and most of the celebrities attended the concert.

They don’t do these huge stadium concerts very often, so I believe this concert will remain an unforgettable concert in the history of Turkey. I don’t remember seeing so many people in a concert before. There were around 30.000 people at the concert.

I didn’t plan to go to this concert as I didn’t know about it. I was hanging out with one of my friends that day who would go to the concert in the evening. He asked me to join him and as I started to hear more of my friends also attending the concert, I couldn’t resist it and bought a ticket last minute. It was such a good decision!

3 - Taşoda Fest

Taşoda Fest is an annual festival that takes place in my university in which all the bands in the university play for 3 days. It is arranged by the music club at the university. In prior years, I was usually performing with some bands at this festival, but because I didn’t join any bands this year, I attended the concert as a listener this year.

Most of my friends were performing so I wanted to listen to them and take their photos. I loved all of the performances and had so much fun listening to them. They played cover songs as well as their original songs.

I attended one more concert this month but unfortunately, I couldn’t have a chance to take a photo of that concert :) I think this summer will be filled with a lot of concerts as a lot of my favorite artists are coming to Istanbul this summer.