International Symposium of Ottoman Istanbul.

Hello, I’m Emrah Safa Gürkan. I’m an associate professor in the Political Science and International Relations department. I want to tell you about the Municipality of Istanbul sponsored International Ottoman Symposium that Istanbul 29 Mayis University organizes every year in order to bring together different academicians on this topic. This is our fourth symposium. The aim of bringing all these academicians together is to remind people of the importance of this imperial capital city that we all live in and to remember some of its neglected history from the Ottoman Period through academic studies. The last symposium we organized was not just for Turkish academics. We had academics from Europe, America, Russia, the Balkans, and many other countries here to talk about not only Istanbul but also other topics to help shed light on Istanbul’s history. There is a Latin expression that says “spoken words fly away while written words live on”, so we decided that all of the research presented at our symposium should be published. Therefore we created Istanbul 29 Mayis University Publishing and we publish books about Ottoman Istanbul. We have published works from our first two symposiums and the third is in progress now. We will hold our next international symposium in May 2016 in conjunction with the celebrations for the conquest of Istanbul. We want to make this a tradition. In this way we want to create a name for both our university and the city of Istanbul. It would not be right to think that this kind of academic work would only be of interest to academics. So we will present this symposium as an opportunity for all of our students to be involved in such an academic environment. Our students can create relationships with academics from all over the world, they can listen to their research, and they can have the opportunity to come together with this kind of academic environment outside of the lecture hall. At the same time, our students can see, from an academic standpoint, what goes into organizing a conference like this and what kind of things one can learn from these types of conferences. I believe that these conferences can enrich the academic environment and have important benefits for our students. Some of our students can volunteer to help with these types of large-scale organizations. In this way, they can gain or improve their organizational skills and gain experience in the details of organizing an international academic conference. In past conferences, our students had difference responsibilities and were very helpful for us. So for potential students or those considering our university in the future, it is so important to always participate in these types of activities both from an intellectual point of view and from an academic point of view. You will not come across these kinds of conferences at many universities. This situation is unthought of by most private schools in terms of both financial and organizational capacity. We expect to see the participation of our students at these types of organizations as a result of the sacrifices we have made.