Rafet El Roman

Rafet El Roman — Biography

Musician and actor Rafet El Roman was born Rafet Yaşdut in Edirne on 25 August 1968. When his parents left for West Germany as labour migrants in 1970, he stayed behind with his grandmother in the village of Ömerbey near Uzunköprü until he was seven, then joined them abroad. He wrote his first compositions as a teenager, made his stage debut in 1988, and a German broadcaster named him its young talent of the year in 1992; only after a four-year court battle in Germany was he permitted to take the stage surname El Roman, taken from a Spanish folk hero.

Moving back to Turkey in 1995, he issued a debut record that passed a million in sales and went on producing chart-topping albums, picking up the Golden Butterfly among other honours along the way. He crossed into film acting in 1999, sharing top billing with Kemal Sunal in Sinan Çetin's Propaganda. A 1996 marriage to model Tuğba Altıntop, which produced two daughters, ended in divorce by 2003; a later relationship gave him a son, and a second marriage in Germany from 2014 also ended, in 2017. By 2026 he was publicly planning a third wedding, and separately announced that he was restoring the ruined Edirne house of his birth to open it as a museum.