Ankara backstops a 809 billion lira fund unwind

The Capital Markets Board has ordered the liquidation of 130 investment funds run by seven asset managers, closing them to trading on the TEFAS platform and trapping 517,503 investors holding TRY 809.1 billion as of 17 September. Within a day the Treasury, the central bank and the banking regulator moved together to ring-fence the damage, an official acknowledgement that a problem the authorities call contained had become large enough to require a coordinated backstop.

• The ruling: The Sermaye Piyasası Kurulu, Turkey's securities regulator, said on 17 September it had suspended subscriptions and redemptions for all TEFAS-traded funds founded by Tera, Pusula, Hedef, Atlas, A1, Pardus and Bulls, and would liquidate 130 named funds by a method it will determine itself. The breakdown is 42 funds at Pardus, 31 at Hedef, 16 at Atlas, 15 at Bulls, 12 at Pusula, 9 at A1 and 5 at Tera.
• The official line: The Financial Stability Committee, chaired by Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek, said the turbulence stems from credit and liquidity problems in some funds at a limited number of asset managers and that there is no fundamental or structural risk in the functioning of Borsa İstanbul or the capital markets. It said agreed measures would be implemented rapidly and that regulators would keep using their powers against those found to have engaged in market-distorting conduct.
• The liquidity response: The central bank widened lira liquidity facilities, raising banks' borrowing limits in the interbank money market tenfold from TRY 51 billion to TRY 510 billion, lifting the weekly repo auction size to TRY 300 billion and cutting collateral haircuts. Separately the BDDK banking regulator ruled that shares banks buy back after 16 September will not be deducted from core capital until 31 December 2026, nor counted in credit and market risk calculations, removing the capital cost of buybacks for the rest of the year.
• The criminal track: The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office imposed travel bans on 48 people, including Emre Tezmen and Serdar Turhan. Pusula Portföy chairman Muhammed Yarız was arrested on 15 September and his bank accounts and assets were placed under injunction; Hedef Holding chairman Namık Kemal Gökalp, Tera Portföy manager İbrahim Bekci and Destek Yatırım chairman Altunç Kumova were detained.
• The price action: BIST 100 fell close to 6% to around the 13,000 level as selling continued, then reversed after the committee statement, closing at 13,509 with a 2.95% gain on TRY 266.5 billion of volume. The banking index led with 8.88%. The index is still down 6.14% on the week and 4.40% on the month, but up 19.96% year to date.
• The trigger behind the trigger: Economist Erhan Aslanoğlu argues the episode began when the risk of removal from MSCI emerging market indices finally pushed the SPK to act on issues such as the composition and actual free float of hedge funds, and that panic and outsized redemptions turned a problem that was not systemic into one that looked like it.
• The corporate residue: Pusula Finans Holding's planned transfer to Tera Group, begun on 9 September with commercial and financial terms agreed a day later, is not legally or practically complete; Tera stressed on 15 September that Pusula Portföy's funds are not under its management or responsibility. Emlak Katılım Bankası has separately opened talks to buy Katılımevim and Birevim, both inside the Pusula structure.

The Federal Reserve raised its policy rate for the first time since July 2023, taking the federal funds target to 3.75-4.00% on 16 September, and signalled more to come. For Turkish assets this removes the external tailwind at exactly the moment the domestic fund market needs one, and it hardens the constraint on how fast the central bank can keep easing.

• The decision: The 25 basis point increase followed the 15-16 September FOMC meeting. The dot plot's median 2026 year-end rate was lifted from 3.8% to 4.1%, implying one further hike this year given the current 3.875% midpoint. Sixteen of 18 participants expect at least one more increase, four expect two. The 2027 median went from 3.6% to 4.1% and 2028 from 3.4% to 3.9%.
• The reasoning: Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said the US economy has strengthened since the June meeting and the labour market is near full employment, but that inflation remains the core problem and summer prints showed no meaningful improvement in underlying price trends.
• The market pressure: Ahead of the meeting Morgan Stanley analysts expected further hikes, arguing disinflation was proceeding more slowly than the Fed likely needs. Principal Asset Management global chief strategist Seema Shah read rising long bond yields as the market effectively testing Fed credibility, and Standard Chartered's Jonathan Liang flagged the sensitivity of 10-year yields to inflation expectations as long as inflation stays above target.
• The divergence: The Bank of England held at 3.75% with a 6-3 vote, the dissenters Megan Greene, Catherine Mann and chief economist Huw Pill arguing energy and food prices could push inflation above 4% in early 2027. UK CPI rose 0.5% on the month and 3.1% on the year in August, a five-month high, with fuel prices up 6.9%.
• The Turkish read-across: Şimşek said an election-economy turn is off the table, telling Bloomberg HT that anyone predicting one has either not read the medium-term programme or does not know arithmetic, that budget targets were met or beaten in each of the last three years and that disinflation will not be abandoned during an election process. He said headline inflation would be seven points lower absent the war in Iran, that the disinflation timeline will stretch somewhat, and that public sector wages and pensions will rise by at least the rate of inflation.
• The commodity overlay: European month-ahead gas contracts reached EUR 77.98, the highest since January 2023, after escalation around the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, which is the supply shock Şimşek is invoking and the main channel through which the Fed's inflation problem becomes Turkey's.

The Federal Reserve raised the federal funds rate 25 basis points to 3.75-4.00% on 16 September, its first increase since July 2023, and signalled at least one more before year end. For anyone funding Turkish lira positions in dollars, the cost of the trade just moved against them and the dot plot says it keeps moving.

• The projections: the 2026 year-end median policy rate was lifted to 4.1% from 3.8%, implying another 25bp beyond the current 3.875% midpoint. Of 18 participants, 16 expect at least one further hike and four expect two. The 2027 median went to 4.1% from 3.6% and 2028 to 3.9% from 3.4%.
• The framing: Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said the US economy had strengthened since the June meeting and the labour market was close to full employment, while inflation remained the core problem and summer prints showed no meaningful improvement in underlying price trends.
• The pressure: the decision followed weeks of bond market pressure. Principal Asset Management global chief strategist Seema Shah read the rise in long-dated yields as the market effectively testing Fed credibility; Morgan Stanley had argued disinflation was running slower than the Fed needs.
• The read-across: with the dollar leg of the carry trade repricing upward into a Turkish market already dealing with a fund liquidation, the cushion that supported lira positioning through 2026 is thinner than it looks.

The Capital Markets Board closed to trading every TEFAS-listed fund founded by seven portfolio management companies and ordered 130 of those funds liquidated by a method it will set itself. This is the largest forced unwind in the history of the Turkish fund industry and it lands directly on more than half a million retail accounts.

• The scale: the 130 funds held TRY 809.1bn as of 17 September across 517,503 investors. The breakdown is 42 funds at Pardus Portföy, 31 at Hedef, 16 at Atlas, 15 at Bulls, 12 at Pusula, 9 at A1 and 5 at Tera.
• The trigger: Turkey faced the risk of removal from MSCI emerging market indices, which pushed the SPK to act on the composition and actual free float of hedge funds, according to economist Erhan Aslanoğlu. Outflows then escalated a contained problem into a run.
• The criminal track: the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office imposed travel bans on 48 people including Emre Tezmen and Serdar Turhan. Pusula Portföy chairman Muhammed Yarız was arrested on 15 September and his bank accounts and assets frozen; Hedef Holding chairman Namık Kemal Gökalp, Tera Portföy manager İbrahim Bekci and Destek Yatırım chairman Altunç Kumova were detained.
• The official line: the Financial Stability Committee, chaired by Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek, said the turbulence stemmed from credit and liquidity problems at a limited number of funds and that there is no fundamental or structural risk in Borsa İstanbul or the capital markets.

The Central Bank widened lira liquidity and the banking regulator suspended the capital cost of bank share buybacks, a two-track intervention aimed at keeping a fund problem from becoming a banking problem. The equity market read it as a floor.

• The liquidity: the TCMB raised banks' borrowing limits in the interbank money market tenfold, from TRY 51bn to TRY 510bn, lifted the weekly repo auction size to TRY 300bn and cut collateral haircuts.
• The capital relief: the BDDK ruled that shares repurchased by listed banks after 16 September will not be deducted from core capital until 31 December 2026, and will be excluded from credit and market risk-weighted asset calculations over the same period. The capital cost of buybacks is effectively zero for the rest of the year.
• The market response: the BIST 100 opened lower and fell to around 12,900 before the Financial Stability Committee statement, then closed up 2.95% at 13,509 on TRY 266.5bn of volume. The banking index gained 8.88%; Yapı Kredi rose 9.96%.
• The damage so far: the index is down 6.14% on the week and 4.40% on the month, still up 19.96% year to date. The prior session had seen a near 6% fall to the 13,000 level.

Emlak Katılım Bankası said its subsidiary Emlak Katılım Tasarruf Finansman has opened talks to buy Katılımevim and Birevim, the savings finance businesses sitting inside Pusula Finans Holding and Pusula Portföy. A state-owned participation bank is now competing for the same assets Tera Group agreed to take.

• The rival process: Tera Group's move on Pusula Finans Holding began on 9 September, with agreement on core commercial and financial terms a day later, covering Pusula Portföy, Pusula Yatırım Menkul Değerler and the listed Katılımevim. The price has never been disclosed.
• The caveat: on 15 September, the day Yarız was jailed, Tera said the transfer was not legally or actually complete and that Pusula Portföy's funds are not at this stage under Tera's management or responsibility.
• Why it matters: savings finance houses collect installments from households toward homes and cars. Their transfer to a state-owned bank's subsidiary would move a retail deposit-like liability out of a group under criminal investigation.

The BDDK transferred the ownership rights, excluding dividends, of the three shareholders holding 99.98% of Golden Global Yatırım Bankası to the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund. The decision came 12 days after Washington sanctioned the bank, and shows Ankara moving quickly to wall off an Iran-exposure problem inside its own system.

• The US case: the Treasury placed Golden Global Yatırım Bankası and Golden Global Portföy Yönetimi on its Iran-related sanctions list, accusing the bank of intermediating tens of millions of dollars of transactions for the IRGC Quds Force and giving Iran access to international transfers.
• The wider pattern: the same week the US Treasury sanctioned VTB Bank, Russia's second largest, for building correspondent relationships with sanctioned Iranian banks, ruble and rial payment infrastructure and transfers of billions in frozen Iranian assets.

Industrial production, autos, business formation and industrial capacity all deteriorated in the latest data, even as card spending hit a nominal record. The gap between nominal turnover and physical output is the clearest sign that the squeeze is being borne by producers.

• Output: TÜİK reported industrial production fell 1% month on month and 0.3% year on year in July. Automotive production dropped 7.3% in the first eight months to 841,583 units, with car output down 19% and capacity utilisation at 59%. Exports fell 12% to 597,594 units.
• Business closures: TESK data show new business registrations down 8% year on year to 193,000 in January to August, while closures rose 11.2% to 82,669.
• Spending: card payments reached TRY 2.99tn in August, up 39% year on year, with TRY 2.53tn on credit cards. Card numbers rose 4% to 478 million. Education services led the inflation rankings as the 2026-2027 school year opened.
• Hiring intent: Turkey's seasonally adjusted net employment outlook rose 1 point on the quarter and 5 on the year to 25 in ManpowerGroup's survey of 39,878 employers across 42 countries, still 4 points below the global 29.

Speaking on Bloomberg HT, the Treasury and Finance Minister said the government will not abandon disinflation through an election period, after President Erdoğan's remarks in Rize about "successfully getting through the approaching elections" revived talk of an early vote.

• The quote: "Friends who say we will run an election economy either have not read the Medium Term Programme or do not know mathematics. We have hit our budget targets for the last three years and performed better. The cost of living is our biggest priority. We will not give up disinflation during the election process either."
• The war premium: Şimşek said headline inflation could have been 7 percentage points lower without the war conditions in Iran, adding that the shock now runs across all commodities through supply chains, and that only the originally projected timeframe will lengthen somewhat.
• The commitment: asked about pension and civil service increases, he said public employee and pensioner salaries will rise at least in line with inflation.

Houthi forces captured the port of Mocha and then Perim Island in the Bab el-Mandeb strait within a week, and have installed themselves on the Greater and Lesser Hanish islands. That closes the southern exit Saudi Arabia had been using to keep exporting while the Strait of Hormuz is unusable, and it puts a new set of missile positions astride the tanker route to Asia.

• The damage: the East-West pipeline, rated at 7 million barrels a day and the line Riyadh had been using to push crude to the Red Sea, was hit by drones coming from Iraq. Saudi Arabia's energy ministry says Yanbu holds five to seven days of export stock; two regional officials told Reuters repairs could take three to five weeks.
• The scale: Saudi output has fallen from 10.9 million barrels a day in February, before the war, to 6.2 million in August. Vortexa put daily crude and product exports from Yanbu at 3.7 million barrels in early September. Attacks on Saudi soil continue, with Aramco facilities targeted by drones and missiles and 73 people wounded in strikes on Khamis Mushait.
• The Ankara angle: the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed a month ago by Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia has not produced a joint force to fight alongside the Saudis in Yemen. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman asked Donald Trump twice for direct American intervention against the Houthis and was refused, with Washington offering only intelligence and targeting support. The gap between defending Saudi territory and joining a Yemen war is now the live question for every signatory.

European month-ahead gas contracts hit 77.98 euros, the highest since January 2023, after the escalation around the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf. For Turkey, an energy importer running a disinflation programme into an election cycle, that is the transmission channel that matters most.

• The claim: Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek told Bloomberg HT that absent the war conditions in Iran, headline inflation could be 7 points below where it is now, adding that the shock is running through supply chains across all commodities, not only energy.
• The commitment: Simsek said the disinflation path is intact and only the timeframe stretches, that pensioners and public sector salaries will rise at least as much as inflation, and dismissed talk of pre-election fiscal loosening with the line that those predicting it "either have not read the medium term programme or do not know mathematics."
• The read: the government is pre-positioning an external excuse for a slower inflation path while promising not to abandon the programme. Watch whether the promised indexation of wages and pensions holds if gas stays near current levels.

Turkey's banking regulator BDDK transferred the shareholder rights, dividends excluded, of the three owners of 99.98 percent of Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi to the deposit insurance fund TMSF. The decision came 12 days after the US Treasury put Golden Global and Golden Global Portfoy on its Iran-linked sanctions list.

• The charge: Treasury accused the bank of brokering tens of millions of dollars of transactions for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force and of giving Iran access to international money transfers.
• The precedent: Ankara moved on its own institution rather than contest the designation, which is the clearest signal yet on how Turkish regulators intend to handle secondary sanctions exposure in the financial sector.
• The wider net: the same enforcement drive hit Russia's second largest bank, VTB, which Treasury says built correspondent relationships with sanctioned Iranian banks, created payment rails in roubles and Iranian rials, and took part in transactions moving billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets.

Turkey and Azerbaijan are developing projects to carry renewable power generated in Central Asia and the Caspian basin to Europe as electricity, routed through Turkey and the Black Sea.

• The shift: the two countries have spent three decades cooperating on oil and gas. Recasting that partnership around power transmission would make Turkey a transit node for electrons rather than only hydrocarbons, with a different set of counterparties and a different regulatory interface with the EU.
• The caveat: no financing, capacity figure or timeline has been made public, and cross-border interconnection of this kind is a decade-scale build. Treat this as positioning for now, not a project pipeline.

In her State of the Union address to the European Parliament, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed an alarm mechanism for European security independent of NATO and announced the intention to build a "European Security Council." When she listed the countries that would sit on it, Turkey was not among them.

• The pivot: von der Leyen framed the speech around new alliances, singling out a distinctive transcontinental partnership with Canada as the model for where Brussels wants to go.
• Why it matters: a security forum designed to work outside NATO structures is precisely the format in which Turkey's leverage as an alliance member does not apply. Ankara's argument for a seat has rested on NATO membership and on its defence industrial base, and neither buys entry to a body the EU convenes on its own terms.

The Alternative for Germany more than doubled its vote in the 6 September state election to 43.8 percent, becoming by a wide margin the strongest party. For the roughly three million people of Turkish origin in Germany, the result moves the remigration debate from the fringe to the doorstep of state-level government.

• The driver: Infratest dimap's analysis found that 65 percent of voters who rated their own financial situation as bad voted AfD, which is the tightest correlation in the data and the hardest one for the mainstream parties to answer with rhetoric alone.
• The stake: at a November 2023 meeting in Potsdam attended by some AfD politicians, the far-right activist Martin Sellner presented a "remigration master plan" that extended beyond people without a right to remain, raising the deportation of "unassimilated citizens" and speaking of creating "high assimilation pressure" on them. The AfD's official programme uses the term only for those without residence rights and rejects the charge that origin alone would be grounds for removal.
• The institutional question: the Brandmauer, the firewall under which CDU, SPD, Greens and the Left refuse coalition or cooperation with the AfD, is now itself under debate in Germany, with critics asking whether it strengthens the party by letting rivals campaign on opposition rather than on programme.

The Capital Markets Board closed to trading every TEFAS-listed fund founded by seven portfolio managers on 17 September and ordered 130 of them liquidated by a method it will determine itself, covering 517,503 investors and TRY 809.1bn in assets. The Financial Stability Committee, chaired by Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek, insists this is a credit and liquidity problem confined to some funds at a limited number of houses, with no fundamental or structural risk in Borsa İstanbul or the capital markets. The more useful question is why a problem regulators call contained produced a near 6% single-day fall in the BIST 100 to around the 13,000 level, and required the central bank to raise interbank borrowing limits tenfold. The answer lies in how fast this corner of the industry grew, and in who ended up holding the paper.

• The mechanism: Erhan Aslanoğlu argues the trigger was not systemic exposure but investor panic, with redemptions reaching extreme levels; no market anywhere withstands savers trying to exit simultaneously, which is how a non-systemic credit problem becomes a market-wide liquidity event.
• The tell everyone saw: identical funds in the same market were posting wildly divergent returns, a pattern participants had noticed long before regulators moved. What finally forced action, per Aslanoğlu, was the risk of exclusion from MSCI's emerging market indices, pushing the SPK onto the content of hedge funds and actual free float.
• The concentration: Pardus accounts for 42 of the liquidated funds, Hedef 31, Atlas 16, Bulls 15, Pusula 12, A1 9 and Tera 5. This is not a single failure but a cluster, which is precisely what makes the official containment claim harder to sustain.
• The enforcement track: the Istanbul chief prosecutor has imposed travel bans on 48 people including Emre Tezmen and Serdar Turhan. Pusula Portföy chairman Muhammed Yarız was jailed on 15 September with his bank accounts and assets frozen; Hedef Holding chairman Namık Kemal Gökalp, Tera Portföy manager İbrahim Bekci and Destek Yatırım chairman Altunç Kumova were detained.
• The backstop, priced: the TCMB raised bank borrowing limits in the interbank money market from TRY 51bn to TRY 510bn and lifted the weekly repo auction to TRY 300bn. The BDDK separately ruled that own shares banks repurchase after 16 September will not be deducted from core capital, nor counted in credit and market risk calculations, until 31 December 2026, removing the capital cost of buybacks for the rest of the year.
• The counter-case: the intervention worked on the tape. The BIST 100 closed at 13,509, up 2.95% on TRY 266.5bn of volume, after falling to around 12,900 in early trade; the banking index rose 8.88%. But the index is still down 6.14% on the week and 4.40% on the month, and up just 19.96% year to date in a high-inflation currency.
• What would falsify containment: the deal flow. Tera Group's acquisition of Pusula Finans Holding, agreed in principle on 10 September and covering Pusula Portföy, Pusula Yatırım Menkul Değerler and listed Katılımevim, is still legally and practically incomplete at an undisclosed price, and Tera says it does not yet manage or bear responsibility for Pusula's funds. Meanwhile Emlak Katılım has opened talks to buy Katılımevim and Birevim. If a state-linked participation bank has to absorb the assets, the problem was larger than seven portfolio managers.

TÜSİAD chairman Ozan Diren told Dünya's Recep Erçin that Turkey needs 10 to 15 year industrial plans drawn up under state leadership and closely monitored in implementation, with sectors, technologies and regional preferences specified in advance. Adnan Dalgakıran, a candidate for the chairmanship of the Istanbul Chamber of Industry, has separately called for a long-term industrial strategy built on collective judgment. The puzzle is that Turkey already plans: the Twelfth Development Plan is in force, annual programmes translate it into budget lines, and investment incentives flow to companies. So the demand is not for plans. It is for a different relationship between the state and the production decision.

• The substantive complaint: Diren says the steps needed for industrial transformation have been delayed while the disinflation fight continues. That frames planning as compensation for a monetary stance that is squeezing manufacturing rather than as an independent agenda.
• The mechanism business actually wants: Dalgakıran's proposal is to replace incentives that keep existing firms alive with a system built around technology investment, productivity, scale and transformation, citing China and suggesting public procurement be used to force technology transfer and that public tenders favour domestic machinery.
• The precedent: Turkey's planning experience began by building factories, which gave the state direct leverage over what got made. Today's instruments are subsidies and programmes, which shape margins but do not decide output, and that gap is the real subject of the argument.
• The evidence the complaint is real: industrial production fell 1% month on month and 0.3% year on year in July. Automotive output dropped 7.3% to 841,583 units in the first eight months, with passenger car production down 19% and exports down 12%, on 59% capacity utilisation. TESK reports business closures up 11.2% to 82,669 between January and August while new registrations fell 8% to 193,000.
• The counter-case on capacity: the OECD's SME Policy Index 2026 profile finds SMEs hold 68.5% of Turkish employment but generate only 41.2% of value added. A plan that picks sectors and technologies presumes firms able to absorb that direction; that productivity gap suggests most cannot, and that scale, not sector selection, is the binding constraint.
• What would falsify the case for a new plan: the Twelfth Development Plan already covers industrial technological transformation, irrigation, railways and vocational training, with annual programmes and budget appropriations behind them. If those instruments are funded and still not moving investment, the missing ingredient is enforcement and credibility, not another document with a longer horizon.

Card payments in August totalled 2.99 trillion lira, up 39% year on year, according to the Interbank Card Centre (BKM), a pace still running well ahead of headline inflation.

• The split: 2.53 trillion lira on credit cards, 445.9 billion lira on debit cards and 7.5 billion lira on prepaid cards, with prepaid volumes down 43% year on year.
• The base: total cards in circulation rose 4% to 478 million.

Turkish industrial production fell 1% month on month and 0.3% year on year in July, per TÜİK, the statistics agency.

Vehicle output fell 7.3% year on year to 841,583 units in the first eight months, the Automotive Manufacturers Association (OSD) reported, with the sector running at 59% of capacity.

• The mix: passenger car output dropped 19% while commercial vehicles rose 12%; car exports fell 28% against a 9% gain in commercial vehicle exports.
• Domestic demand: unit sales fell 12% to 745,597.

Between January and August, new business registrations fell 8% to 193,000 while closures rose 11.2% to 82,669, according to TESK, the confederation of tradesmen and craftsmen.

The OECD's SME Policy Index 2026 Turkey profile puts small and medium enterprises at 68.5% of employment but only 41.2% of value added, a productivity gap that frames the industrial-planning debate.

Turkey's seasonally adjusted net employment outlook rose 1 point on the quarter and 5 points on the year to 25 in ManpowerGroup's survey of 39,878 employers across 42 countries, still 4 points below the global reading of 29.

• Sector spread: hospitality leads at 38, while construction and real estate jumped 22 points year on year into second place.

Turkey placed 11 companies in the Fortune 500 Europe 2026 ranking, a list whose 500 members generated 15.5 trillion dollars of revenue in 2025 and more than 1 trillion dollars of profit.

• The top: Volkswagen led for a third consecutive year with 363.1 billion dollars in revenue.

Several fixed points now sit on the calendar for anyone tracking Turkish markets, policy and the corporate scene.

• 31 December 2026: the BDDK exemption expires, after which bank share buybacks again count against core capital and risk-weighted assets.
• 24 to 26 September: Furnishings & Design Istanbul at the Istanbul Expo Center, with 90 brands and qualified buyers from 23 countries.
• 1 October: Tesla is due to unveil the new Roadster, first announced in 2017 with deliveries originally promised for 2020.
• 22 December: deadline for users to withdraw assets from Hong Kong crypto exchange CoinEx, which began winding down services on 15 September.

Table by Bruno Verjus, one of the most celebrated restaurants in Paris, will serve its last dinner on 22 December 2026, and its chef framed the closure as a verdict on the format rather than a business failure. Verjus announced the decision with the words "Fine dining öldü," fine dining is dead.

• The record: Table entered The World's 50 Best Restaurants at number 10 in 2023, rose to third in 2024 and stood at eighth in 2025, all with two Michelin stars and a small, product-led room.
• The argument: Verjus, who came to professional kitchens at 54 after medicine, entrepreneurship and food journalism, says the problem is that the format now serves an ever narrower and more privileged slice of diners. He intends to keep cooking through a more accessible model.
• The local read: Istanbul's high end is moving the other way. Burger & Lobster, founded in London in 2011, opened its first European restaurant outside the United Kingdom at Zorlu Center, its twentieth worldwide, and Bodrum's Maçakızı entered the 51 to 100 extension of The World's 50 Best Hotels 2026 at number 76 as Turkey's only hotel on the list.

Çiğdem Mater, the film producer sentenced to 18 years over the 2013 Gezi Park protests, releases her first book on 18 September under the İletişim Yayınları imprint, written in prison and titled Tuhaf, Saçma ve Neyse, roughly Strange, Absurd and Whatever.

• The framing: In the publisher's note Mater describes the three words as compartment markers in her mind, with "court, trial, justice, prison" filed under strange and absurd, and everything else under the "whatever" where she kept her own space of freedom.

The autumn cultural calendar is unusually dense for anyone passing through, with three programmes now confirmed and tickets already moving.

• Theatre: The 30th İstanbul Theatre Festival runs 22 October to 3 December under curator Mehmet Birkiye with 17 productions, 6 international and 11 domestic, closing on Birkiye's own staging of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The festival's honorary award went to actor Tilbe Saran on 9 September. Tickets are on sale.
• Film and art: Filmekimi screens 9 to 18 October in Istanbul, with 19 Cannes titles including Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or winner Fjord and Pedro Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas, and tickets go on sale 29 September. Artweeks Istanbul's "Collectors" edition shows three private collections free of charge at Akaretler Sıraevler until 8 November, including 140 works by 91 artists from the Öner Kocabeyoğlu holdings.