Zara Larsson's First Night in Turkey: Inside the Istanbul Show

On Sunday 9 August 2026, Zara Larsson walked onto a stage in a pine forest on the northern edge of Istanbul while Tarkan's Dudu played over the PA. It was the first concert of her career in Turkey: 20 entries on the setlist, 75 minutes on stage, at Bonus Parkorman in Maslak.

This page is the full record of that night: the setlist in order, the running times, what tickets cost, the fan moment that reached millions of views, and whether she is coming back. It also covers what happened in the same forest two weeks later, when Babylon Soundgarden brought Jack White to the same stages.

Zara Larsson in Istanbul: the night in facts

• Date: Sunday 9 August 2026, part of the Pozitif Vibrations series.

• Venue: Bonus Parkorman, Büyükdere Caddesi No: 263, Maslak, in the Sarıyer district.

• Running order: gates 18:00, opener INJI at 20:00, Larsson on stage 21:30 to 22:45.

• Tickets: general admission 2,600 TL early-bird, 3,200 TL afterwards; the front section 5,000 TL early and 6,000 TL standard. General sale opened 13 April 2026 at 10:30 through Biletix, Passo and Bubilet.

• Set: 75 minutes, 20 entries logged on setlist.fm, two covers and one acoustic moment.

• Why it mattered: after a decade of hits that reached Turkey without her, this was her first Turkish date, slotted into the Midnight Sun Tour between Untold in Romania and Sziget in Budapest.

One number there is worth holding on to: 21:30. An Istanbul open-air headline set starts late and ends near midnight, and at this venue that single fact decides how your night ends.

The full Zara Larsson Istanbul setlist

This is what she played at Bonus Parkorman on 9 August 2026, in order, as logged by setlist.fm's community:

1. Dudu (the Tarkan song, played from tape as she walked on)

2. Midnight Sun (extended intro)

3. Can't Tame Her (alternative version)

4. SHE DID IT AGAIN (Tyla cover, shortened)

5. I Would Like / Sundown

6. Hot & Sexy (extended intro)

7. Wow (guitar outro)

8. Ain't My Fault

9. Dancers' roll call (from tape)

10. Pretty Ugly

11. Stateside (PinkPantheress cover, shortened)

12. Eurosummer

13. Never Forget You (solo version, with the band introduction)

14. Ruin My Life

15. Uncover (acoustic)

16. Blue Moon

17. Lush Life (with a fan brought on stage for the dance break)

18. Symphony (her Clean Bandit collaboration)

19. Midnight Sun (reprise, with a live intro and a remix outro)

Against the tour's standard set, which runs to roughly 22 songs, Istanbul got a compressed festival-length version - and the Tarkan intro was unique to this date. setlist.fm's log runs to 20 entries; the 19 above are the ones documented in order.

Why she came on to a Tarkan song, and what the cat post was about

Larsson walked on dancing to Tarkan's Dudu, and it got the loudest reaction of the night before she had sung a note. It is the small thing visiting acts routinely skip: booking the date is not the same as arriving having listened to anything Turkish.

Earlier that day she had posted a photo of herself in cat-whisker makeup, captioned "Meow for Istanbul! City of cats" - a nod to the street cats that serve as the city's unofficial mascots. Between songs she also told the crowd something that had not come up elsewhere on the tour: her first tattoo was done in Turkey, on a holiday when she was 16, with her best friend. Turkish media ran that line the following morning.

The fan on stage: what happened during Lush Life

Larsson closes most shows on this tour the same way: she picks one person out of the crowd to dance through Lush Life with her and her professional dancers.

In Istanbul she chose a young man named Berkant, and that is precisely why the clip travelled: Larsson has nearly always pulled a young woman up for the slot, so the choice was itself the headline in the Turkish press. Berkant did not freeze either - he picked up the choreography on the spot and held his own next to the dance team for the whole song. Video of the moment passed 7.8 million views and 20,000 likes within a day.

The practical takeaway hiding inside a nice story: the best material lands at the end, so leaving three songs early to beat the exit crowd is how you miss it.

Had Zara Larsson ever performed in Turkey before?

No. Despite Lush Life, Never Forget You and Symphony being radio fixtures in Turkey for years, 9 August 2026 was the first time she performed in the country. Her only previous connection was personal: the holiday at 16 that ended with a tattoo.

Will Zara Larsson come back to Turkey?

Not on the current schedule. The Midnight Sun Tour opened in Munich on 28 October 2025 and runs to about 100 shows across five continents, and every date after Istanbul takes it away from this part of the world: Sziget in Budapest on 11 August, Rock in Rio on 13 September, Las Vegas on 18 September, then North America, Seoul and Tokyo, Australia and New Zealand, and a scheduled finish in Bangkok on 1 November 2026.

As of 4 September 2026 no second Turkish date has been announced. If you want to be early on one, the announcement will come from Pozitif and the tickets will go on sale at Biletix, Passo and Bubilet, the same three sellers that handled the Parkorman show.

Who is Zara Larsson?

Swedish, from Stockholm, and famous at home long before she was famous anywhere else: she won the talent show Talang in 2008 as a child. The international breakthrough was Lush Life in 2015, followed by Never Forget You with MNEK and Symphony with Clean Bandit, which is still the song most casual listeners can name.

The Istanbul show came in support of Midnight Sun, her fifth studio album, released in 2025 - which is why the set leaned newer than a greatest-hits crowd might have expected, opening and closing with the title track.

Bonus Parkorman: how to get there

The venue sits inside Park Orman Tabiat Parkı, a 148-hectare pine forest at Büyükdere Caddesi No: 263 in Maslak - the business-tower end of Istanbul, rather than anywhere tourists usually stay.

• Metro. Line M2 (Yenikapı-Hacıosman), Darüşşafaka station, about a five-minute walk to the gate. Maslak station works too but sits further out along Büyükdere Caddesi.

• Bus. The Fatih Orman stop on Büyükdere Caddesi is served by the 25G, 29A, 29C, 29D, 41, 42M, 47L, 59RK, 59RS, 62H and D2.

• Driving. Paid parking on site fills early on festival days, and the single access road backs up in both directions around gate time.

Arriving is genuinely easy: from Taksim the M2 takes about 20 minutes. It is the return leg that catches people out.

What happened at Parkorman two weeks later: Babylon Soundgarden

Same forest, much bigger footprint. Babylon Soundgarden ran across the Parkorman stages on 22 and 23 August 2026, gates at 15:00 rather than 18:00. Saturday was headlined by TOMORA, the project pairing Norwegian singer AURORA with Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers, alongside Islandman, Vendredi Sur Mer and Rikas.

Sunday 23 August was the rock day and the bigger draw: Jack White played 22:10 to 23:30, a 23-song set pulling from his solo albums, The White Stripes (Seven Nation Army, Black Math) and The Raconteurs (Steady, as She Goes), plus a cover of The Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog. Wet Leg and The Kills filled the rest of the day.

Three headline nights in one forest inside a fortnight, all of them ending late, all of them emptying onto the same single access road. Which brings us to the part everyone underestimates.

Getting home from Parkorman after midnight

Istanbul runs a night metro, but only on the nights linking Friday to Saturday and Saturday to Sunday, and at double fare. Otherwise the M2 stops around midnight. Against the calendar that gets specific: 9 August was a Sunday, so when Larsson came off at 22:45 there was no night service into Monday. Nor on 23 August, the Jack White night.

That leaves taxis, and Parkorman is close to the worst place in Istanbul to look for one. A forest venue empties through a narrow set of exits, several thousand people hit Büyükdere Caddesi inside the same ten minutes, and the drivers who show up can pick and choose: refusing the fare, declining the meter, naming a price. Ride-hailing apps surge for the same reason.

The alternative is to remove the variable. A pre-booked private chauffeur service puts a named driver at an agreed meeting point at an agreed time, at a fixed price quoted in euros before you travel - and for a group of four to eight, a single Mercedes Vito usually comes out at less per head than two surged taxis.

Flying in for a show at Parkorman

Istanbul Airport (IST) is roughly 40 km from Maslak, typically 45 to 60 minutes. Sabiha Gökçen (SAW) is on the Asian side, roughly 50 km and usually an hour or more, since it means crossing a Bosphorus bridge. Both stretch in Friday evening traffic, so build in a margin if you land on the day of a show.

Maslak is short on the things people come to Istanbul for, so most concert-goers stay in Beyoğlu, Şişli or along the Bosphorus and travel up for the evening. With a free daytime before a 21:30 stage time, a private daily tour of Istanbul covers the historic peninsula at your own pace, and a guided historical Istanbul tour adds someone explaining what you are looking at. For a free night, a private Bosphorus cruise with dinner is an Istanbul evening without a queue.

The short version

Zara Larsson played her first Turkish concert on 9 August 2026 at Bonus Parkorman: Tarkan's Dudu as an entrance, 75 minutes, 20 entries on the setlist, and a Lush Life dance break with a fan named Berkant that went viral overnight. Tickets ran 2,600 to 6,000 TL. Two weeks later Jack White closed the venue's summer with a 23-song set. No return date in Turkey has been announced.

If you are going to the next big name booked into that forest, the order is simple: buy the ticket, then arrange the ride home before the night rather than during it.