Turkish Television & A Blog Hop

Image via WikipediaThe theme is TV over at Alex Cavanaugh's Blogfest so I thought I'd multitask and entertain today with the Turkish romantic drama Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love). 

Following in the footsteps of the Cinderalla story Gümüş/ Noor,  Aşk-ı Memnu is insanely popular outside of Turkey. The soap opera has its own Youtube channel, in case you miss an episode.  There are versions with English subtitles and the series, also dubbed into Arabic, is aired all over the Middle East. Need a French version? How about Romanian? Got it.

No one can get enough and I have a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with the male lead of both of the shows, Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ.


Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ

The root of Aşk-ı Memnu is a bitter love triangle. Behlul  is the (very handsome) young man who falls in love with Bihter, who unfortunately is already married to his uncle. Then Behlul gets engaged to Bihter's step-daughter, Nihal. Bihter doesn't want to let him go. The affair continues with the danger of discovery lurking around every corner. Nihal and the uncle are oblivious, of course. The story is adapted from an Ottoman novel by Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil.

This is the episode where Behlul gets engaged to Nihal, with English subtitles.  If you haven't read my post on Rules of Engagement, you might want to that too.

So...who else is following Kıvanç now? I call dibs on him for one of my characters (betas take a guess)!

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