The Genre That Arrived With Rules Attached: How a Newspaper Contest Commissioned Anatolian Rock

Most scenes are named after the fact, by journalists reaching for a shorthand. Anatolian rock is one of the rare ones that arrived with a brief. In 1965 the Istanbul daily Hürriyet announced a competition called Altın Mikrofon, the Golden Microphone, and attached a rule to it that read less like a contest condition than a design specification: play Western instruments, play Turkish music. Guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, sometimes a saxophone. Original Turkish lyrics or folk material from the countryside, rearranged. No covers of English language hits.

Turkish musicians had been playing rock and R&B since the late 1950s, and The Shadows had been enormous in Turkey at the start of the decade, partly because instrumental music travels without a language barrier. What the Golden Microphone did was remove the option of imitation. If you wanted the prize, you had to go find something Turkish and figure out how to play it on a Fender.

The Prize Was a Residency

The mechanics mattered as much as the rule. A jury narrowed the field, then ten finalists were flown around the country to play three songs each in front of audiences in major Turkish cities, with the winner chosen by secret ballot from the crowd. The prize was not a trophy. It was a nightly gig with a monthly stipend at The Oriental, a new club in Istanbul, plus a 45 and whatever it earned. A national newspaper had built a functioning career pipeline and pointed it at the Anatolian interior.

The 1965 result was almost comically off target. First place went to Yıldırım Gürses, a large voiced crooner whose entry was among the least contemporary things in the competition. Second place went to a five piece called Mavi Işıklar, whose “Helvacı” collided doo wop with belly dance figures and became a genuine hit. The paper, never modest, credited itself with the band’s existence.

Losing Was the Better Career Move

The contest ran annually through 1968, with a later revival attempt in 1972, and the pattern held: the winners are footnotes and the runners up built the genre. The 1966 winner Silüetler, obsessive students of The Shadows, and the 1967 runner up Apaşlar merged into Moğollar, who became the most serious thinkers about what Turkish rock could actually mean. They also understood the visual argument. While their contemporaries dressed as Western hipsters, Moğollar wore ethnic costume and white sheepskin boots.

The 1968 edition was the largest and the last: seven bands, thirty two musicians and their families, seventeen days on a bus across the Anatolian heartland. Moğollar placed third with “Ilgaz”, a love song addressed to a mountain. Fourth place went to a little known outfit billed as the Erkin Koray Dörtlüsü. Nobody in the room knew they had just ranked the next fifteen years of Turkish guitar music in fourth position.

The Instrument the Rule Forced Into Existence

Koray spent the following decade fusing Anatolian folk, blues, Egyptian film music and heavy fuzz into something with no obvious precedent anywhere. The lazy comparison, made constantly, was the Turkish Hendrix. The more interesting fact is a piece of hardware. Koray, alongside Orhan Gencebay, is credited with the electro bağlama, an amplified version of the long necked Turkish lute, built because the acoustic instrument could not survive next to a drum kit and a stack. The contest rule said Western instruments and Turkish music. The rule got taken literally enough that somebody built a hybrid instrument to satisfy both halves at once.

His 1974 album Elektronik Türküler, folk ballads run through electric arrangement, is the clearest single statement of what the Golden Microphone had asked for nine years earlier. By then the genre had its own name, taken from the title of Moğollar’s 1971 debut: Anadolu Pop.

What the Rule Left Behind

The September 1980 coup ended the run. Musicians went into exile or into other work, and the catalogue effectively vanished for a decade, with Arabesque filling the space. The recovery came from outside: European reissue labels, crate diggers, and producers who found the records before Turkish listeners rediscovered them. Selda Bağcan’s “İnce İnce” was sampled by Mos Def and by Dr Dre. GonjaSufi built a track on Erkin Koray. Altın Gün, a Dutch and Turkish band, now tours the Moğollar songbook across Europe.

Koray died in Toronto in 2023, aged 82, decades and an ocean away from a fourth place finish on a bus tour. The constraint that produced all of this was arbitrary, commercial, and imposed by a newspaper looking for circulation. Scenes are usually credited to geography or to a venue or to a cheap piece of gear. This one came from a rule that made the easy option illegal.