Erkan Kolçak Köstendil, the goalkeeper turned mob boss who arrived at Sundance quietly

Erkan Kolçak Köstendil

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 16, 1983 Bursa, Turkey
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Muslum, Let's Sin, Sibel
Awards	Actor of the Year · Young Actor Special · Sadri Alışık Theater and Cinema Awards · GQ Men of the Year (Turkey)

There is a question that follows Turkish actors who make it very big very fast in crime television: can they get out? Not of the genre — out of the gravity of the character, the weight of being someone millions of people watched do brutal things for four consecutive seasons. Erkan Kolçak Köstendil spent the better part of a decade building that gravity, and then spent the last few years quietly dismantling it.

He was born in Bursa in 1983 into a family whose surname tells its own story — Köstendil, after Kyustendil, the Bulgarian city where his ancestors lived before the migration that brought them to northwestern Anatolia. His uncle is actor Bülent Şakrak, which might suggest a family path, but Köstendil went to Bursa Atatürk High School as a goalkeeper first. He was good enough to play youth football for Bursaspor, training seriously for a professional career between 1996 and 1999. Then he met two actors at a crossroads in his life that he has described as decisive, and theatre at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts took the place of the pitch.

Theater gave him an early and clear signal. At the Tuncay Özinel Theater, he wrote, directed, and starred in plays, taking the Actor of the Year and Young Actor Special awards for the production AuT. He also wrote and directed the first Turkish Facebook series, Mukadderat, in 2009, and followed it with a short film, Vakit, that collected awards. The pattern was already visible: he was not simply an actor waiting for roles, but someone who made material when the material wasn’t coming.

His television breakthrough came that same year in Sakarya Fırat, playing a low-ranking soldier with an authenticity that got him noticed. Supporting roles accumulated. Then, in 2014, Ulan İstanbul gave him Karlos Nevizade — a character who became a phenomenon among Turkish viewers, partly because of the chemistry with co-star Şebnem Bozoklu and partly because of a song Köstendil wrote for the show, Yanarim Yanarim, which drew millions of views on YouTube. Historical drama followed in Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem, where he played Şahin Giray, the last Khan of Crimea — a register entirely different from the Istanbul streets of Ulan İstanbul.

What followed was Çukur. The crime drama that ran on Show TV from 2017 to 2021 — 130 episodes across four seasons, a 7.7 on IMDb from more than 22,000 ratings — became the vehicle through which Köstendil turned a supporting arc into a cultural phenomenon. His character, Vartolu Sadettin, began as a fearsome outsider returning to the old Istanbul neighborhood, a man of violent history and complicated loyalties. Over four seasons, the role expanded to fill the show. Çukur watchers did not simply follow the Koçovalı family; many of them watched for Vartolu.

The problem with that kind of success is visible enough in the Turkish industry: actors who define a hit crime role often find themselves offered more hit crime roles. The contradiction in Köstendil’s career is not that he played Vartolu badly — he played him with extraordinary precision — but that the role’s dominance created an expectation that any work measuring up to Çukur had to be Çukur-adjacent. He rejected that narrowing in practice if not always in public. Veliaht, the Show TV series that concluded in March 2026, kept him in the genre ecosystem but gave him Yahya Kaptan, a different kind of authority — quieter, more morally opaque.

The sharpest argument against the Vartolu box came from the Sundance Film Festival in January 2025. The Things You Kill, directed by Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Alireza Khatami, features Köstendil as Reza, a gardener who is drawn into a professor’s scheme to avenge his mother’s suspicious death. The film — a Turkey, France, Poland, and Canada co-production — won the Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance. Reza says relatively little. He carries the film’s moral weight in a register that has nothing in common with Vartolu’s explosive presence. The performance went largely uncommented as the press focused on Khatami’s direction, which is precisely the point: it worked precisely because it was invisible.

His son Marsel was born from his marriage to actress Cansu Tosun, whom he wed in 2018. The couple divorced in May 2026, amicably and in a single hearing at the Gemlik Courthouse, with Marsel in his mother’s custody.

What comes next for Köstendil at the international level is genuinely open. The Things You Kill continued to screen through 2025 and received a US release through Cineverse in early 2026. Whether that exposure translates to European or American production interest in casting him remains to be seen — the language barrier that Turkish-language actors face in crossing over is real and specific. What is already visible is that his instinct has been to use the post-Çukur years to diversify deliberately, choosing projects that refuse to let Vartolu define what he can do.