- The 2026 edition of the Culture Route Festivals will transform Türkiye into a major cultural stage for over seven months, with thousands of events taking place across 26 cities.
- The programme, which combines the performing arts, heritage and gastronomy, reinforces its position as one of Europe’s most ambitious cultural events.
Turkey continues to consolidate its position as one of the Mediterranean’s major cultural hubs with the expansion of the Culture Route Festivals, a project that this year reaches its largest scale to date. Recognised as a member of the European Festivals Association (EFA), the programme will take place in 26 cities across the country and run for 234 days, transforming the nation into a vast open-air cultural stage.
Promoted by Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the festival was launched in 2021 in Istanbul with the Beyoğlu Culture Route Festival and has grown rapidly in just a few years. By 2025, it had already reached 20 cities, with over 9,600 events and the participation of more than 50,000 artists over 180 days. The 2026 edition marks a new qualitative and quantitative leap in its scope.
This year’s programme will visit cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antalya, Bursa, Gaziantep, Konya, Trabzon, Mardin and Diyarbakır, amongst many others, and will also include six new venues: Aydın, Eskişehir, Kahramanmaraş, Mersin, Ordu and Sakarya. The programme will kick off on 25 April in Şanlıurfa and conclude on 15 November in Adana.
Throughout the tour, thousands of activities will transform the country into a vast cultural circuit featuring concerts, exhibitions, theatre performances, opera, talks and workshops. The aim is to bring cultural heritage closer to both local and international audiences, highlighting the diversity of the country’s different regions.
One of the highlights of this year’s programme will be the children’s programme, featuring workshops, outdoor activities, shows and educational spaces designed to bring the arts to younger generations.
Gastronomy will also play a leading role in the festival. As a new feature, specific initiatives will be introduced to showcase the local cuisine of each city. To this end, committees of experts will be set up to identify the most representative products and dishes of each destination, thereby creating their own gastronomic routes. In addition, each province will have a ‘city chef’, responsible for curating the culinary programme and promoting the local gastronomic heritage through workshops, tastings and immersive experiences.
The aim is to offer a more structured and cohesive overview of the country’s culinary heritage, integrating gastronomy as an essential part of the festival’s cultural experience.
Looking ahead, the Culture Route Festivals will continue to expand, with plans to reach 32 cities by 2027, incorporating new venues such as Balıkesir, Denizli, Hatay, Kocaeli, Muğla and Tekirdağ, in a project that aims to gradually cover the whole of Turkey.
The full festival programme and further information can be found on the official website of the Culture Route Festivals or by following the Instagram account @turkiye_kulturyolu.
About the TÜRKİYE TOURISM PROMOTION AND DEVELOPMENT AGENCY (TGA)
TGA operates to ensure that Türkiye is a recognised brand in national and international tourism, to promote Türkiye’s tangible and intangible, natural, cultural, biological and man-made heritage, and to engage in short-, medium- and long-term communication and marketing activities, with the aim of increasing the contribution of tourism investment to the national economy and improving the quality of service in tourism.
TGA is responsible for carrying out all promotional, marketing and communication activities to help Türkiye achieve its tourism objectives, promote and market existing tourism resources worldwide, and identify, develop and make potential tourism resources available online, in line with the tourism strategies and policies drawn up by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
Source: COMUNICACIÓN IBEROAMERICANA