Bühne der Kulturen

The Stage of Cultures, descended from the Arkadas Theater founded in 1983 by Necati Sahin, was Cologne's intercultural theater for plays about multicultural coexistence. In 1986 the ensemble became the first German-Turkish theater in North Rhine-Westphalia to occupy its own building, a small sensation on the independent scene; in 2003 it won the Cologne Theater Prize. It tackled themes like honor killings, dual-language identity and the legacy of the German guest-worker accords long before the city theaters did. The venue is now closed, but its legacy lives on in Cologne's independent Turkish-German theater scene.