Kanye West draws 70,000 in Tbilisi after 118,000 in Istanbul

Kanye West performed his first-ever concert in Georgia on Friday, drawing 70,000 fans to a sold-out Boris Paichadze Dinamo Arena in Tbilisi, continuing a European tour that has produced the largest concert attendance figures of his career despite a string of cancellations in Western Europe that preceded it.

All tickets for the Tbilisi venue were sold before the show, which started at 5:30 p.m. GMT on June 12. Thousands more fans gathered on streets surrounding the stadium after failing to secure tickets, with authorities closing several roads around the Dinamo Arena to both vehicle and pedestrian traffic to manage crowd flow and maintain public safety. The concert was streamed live on West’s official YouTube channel, extending the audience well beyond the 70,000 inside the stadium.

The Georgia performance came less than two weeks after West drew 118,000 fans to Istanbul’s Ataturk Olympic Stadium on May 30, 2026, a show widely reported as one of the largest stadium concert attendance figures recorded in recent memory. The Istanbul performance marked his first European appearance in more than a decade and attracted concertgoers travelling from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia and Poland. He performed under his legal name Ye for much of the Istanbul show’s promotional material.

The Tbilisi crowd included Georgian concertgoers and visitors who had travelled to the country specifically to attend. Fans began lining up hours before the gates opened, with queues forming around the stadium from midday.

The two shows represent a striking commercial resilience for an artist whose European tour has been repeatedly disrupted. West was denied a visa by UK authorities ahead of a planned Wireless Festival appearance, prompting the cancellation of that show. Concerts planned for France, Poland and other Western European countries were also cancelled following opposition from local politicians and venue owners. His planned Prague concert was cancelled as recently as June 11 when a venue owner terminated the organiser’s contract. A Dutch court rejected attempts to block his Netherlands shows, which proceeded.

The Istanbul and Tbilisi performances demonstrate that West retains the commercial drawing power to fill the largest available venues in the markets that have hosted him, even as that pool of willing markets has narrowed in Western Europe. The 118,000 at Istanbul’s Ataturk Olympic Stadium and the 70,000 at Tbilisi’s Dinamo Arena together represent a combined audience of 188,000 people in two consecutive shows, a total that most current touring artists of any genre would not approach across multiple dates in those same cities.

West’s net worth is estimated at approximately $400 million by Forbes, a figure significantly reduced from its 2021 peak of $6.6 billion when his Adidas partnership was generating between $100 million and $200 million annually. In May 2025, he published a full-page apology in the Wall Street Journal addressing the antisemitic statements he made in October 2022 that triggered the wave of commercial and institutional cancellations that preceded his current European tour.

The concerts in Istanbul and Tbilisi have generated no reported incidents of the kind that have accompanied his Western European appearances, and both cities received him without the political opposition that has made venue booking difficult across much of the rest of the continent.