Volkan Konak

Volkan Konak — Biography

Volkan Konak was a folk singer who took Black Sea music to a wide audience, enriching it with his own compositions and poetry. Known as "Kuzeyin Oğlu" (Son of the North), he is best remembered for the song Cerrahpaşa, and his 2006 album Mora earned a gold record from MÜ-YAP. He died on 31 March 2025 after falling ill during a concert in Northern Cyprus, and was buried in Maçka.

Born in the village of Yeşilyurt, he entered the Istanbul Technical University Turkish Music State Conservatory in 1983 on his teacher's encouragement and completed a master's degree on folk music there in 1991. He began in 1989 with Suların Horon Yeri, a collection of material gathered around Maçka. He then set verse by poets such as Nâzım Hikmet, Sabahattin Ali and Sunay Akın to music and turned ethnic motifs into a style of his own. His 1993 album Efulim was the breakthrough, followed by Gelir misin Benimle, Volkanik Parçalar and Pedaliza, released on Kuzey Müzik Prodüksiyon, the company he founded. In 1997 Politika magazine named him Music Artist of the Year, and from 1998 he widened his repertoire to folk songs from Central Anatolia, the Aegean and Rumelia. Şimal Rüzgarı, Maranda, Mimoza and Lifor were later albums.

At concerts he recited poems and told humorous stories. He spent two years researching the effects of Chernobyl on the Black Sea region and campaigned for a cancer research hospital there. A first-anniversary commemoration was held in Trabzon in 2026, and a tribute concert was staged in his name in İzmir.