Famous Turkish singer İbrahim Tatlıses was injured after the vehicle he was traveling in collided with a truck in southwestern Türkiye on Thursday.
The singer was traveling in Bodrum, a popular resort town in Muğla province, where he mostly spends his summers and was scheduled to perform at a concert on Thursday night. The driver of the truck and three other people in Tatlıses' van were also injured. Footage from the scene showed a black van whose front was crushed, apparently in a head-on crash with a truck that was hanging from a shallow cliff. Paramedics and firefighters rushed to the scene to help the victims. They managed to remove Tatlıses from the vehicle and transferred him to the hospital. Initial investigation showed drivers lost control of their vehicles on the road, which became slippery due to the rains. The engines of two vehicles also caught fire after the accident, but passersby managed to extinguish the fire.
Singer's Instagram account shared a video of Tatlıses in a hospital bed, thanking everyone for calling him to wish him well after the accident. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was among the callers. Ebru Yaşar, a singer friend of Tatlıses, was among his visitors at the hospital. Speaking to reporters, Yaşar said Tatlıses has a fracture in his leg but was insisting on performing at tonight's concert. "He was a bit scared but I told him that bullets did not kill him, so an accident would not do more harm," she said, referring to an earlier armed assault targeting Tatlıses. "It was a serious accident, though and he told me that he was lying down and resting on the backseat when it happened and he rolled over three times, breaking his leg," she said.
Tatlıses, dubbed as “Emperor,” has been a staple of the Turkish music scene since the 1970s. Also a well-known singer in the Middle East with his soulful interpretations of folk songs and “arabesque” songs borrowing heavily from Arabic tunes, the 70-year-old singer is still very popular in Türkiye.
He kept a low profile in recent years after an armed assault in 2011 left him partially paralyzed and spent years in treatment before making a comeback with a TV show in 2020, which continued until May 2022.
