Unguided Blog

The 15th Aspendos Opera and Ballet Festival will start on June 07th. If you are around Antalya until July 03rd (the closing date of the festival), you would not want to miss this spectacular event. After all, there are not many antique theaters left where live performances are available.

The event will host Ankara, Antalya and Istanbul State Opera Houses in addition to the international participants, namely Sofia National Opera and Ballet of Bulgaria and Francesco Cilea Theater of Reggio Calabria/Italy.

Various operas and ballets of Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Mozart, Minkus and Bellini will be performed in a setting you are unlikely to forget. Don’t miss it.

I promised to give the link to the virtual gallery of Istanbul Puppet Festival. Since I moved the events/news to the blog section, the updates will be made here. For those interested, the on-line photo stream of the puppet festival is now available.

Among the participating countries, namely Cambodia, China, Thailand, India, Indonesia, I have found particularly Indonesian entries most interesting, although it is really difficult to choose. Well, it was not a contest anyway. I am sure that you will like them all.

I am a bit disappointed for not finding all of the entries in the photo stream, but the organizers only uploaded the photos belonging to the “shadow theater” division. I would really like to see pictures of especially Burjubas Puppet Group of Fabianne Villareal from Argentina or Stefan Libardi’s Theater Im Ohrensessel (they adapted Grimm Brothers’ fantastic story of Iron Hans - Der Eisenhans) online.

The Istanbul International Poetry Festival starts today. Among the guests we can count Saadi Yousef, Claudio Pozzani, Jean Pierre Balpe, Pedro Shimose, Pio Serrano, Sergey Gandlevski and Joan Margarit. It may sound awkward to promote such an event to travelers, but it is really difficult to find those names (read: poets) together anywhere. So, if you’re around Istanbul, do not miss it. I will not say the same thing for the festival’s crappy, flashy, ugly site Istanbul Siir Festivali, which is a pain in the neck (apparently they did not think linux users and/or they have other technical problems).

The main theme of the event will be Catalan poems and two of the poets mentioned, Iraqi Saadi Yousef and Cuban Pio Serrano both live in exile.

There is an opening concert of Cihat Askin at the Archaeology Museum, the closing concert will be given by Ayse Tutuncu Percussion Group.