Abstract
This chapter analyses the administrative and political processes of both application to World Heritage status and management of World Heritage sites. It endeavors to establish whether one may speak of a Turkish United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNESCO policy. It examines how a UNESCO project emerges, is drawn up, and leads to a site being inscribed on the World Heritage List. It explores local, national, and international levels of action, and identifies the different actors (political, administrative, and expert) involved in each stage of the process running from drawing up a tentative list (amounting to a national selection of potential candidates) through to the final decision by the World Heritage Committee. The chapter examines the case study of Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape.
The author is particularly grateful to Mrs Nevin Soyukaya: this research could not have been elaborated without the exceptional work she has been leading in Diyarbakır during the past few years.
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Notes
- 1.
It was during the 40th session of the World Heritage Committee (held in Istanbul on July 10–20, 2016) that Nabi Avci (the Republic of Turkey’s minister for culture and tourism) announced that Turkey would be increasing its contribution to the international organization’s budget, from 1% of UNESCO’s ordinary budget to 2%.
- 2.
While the 1972 convention defines the fundamental bases of the program, the continually evolving guidelines emphasize adaptations to new policy directions, normative requirements, and rules of functioning. For a discussion of the origins of the World Heritage program, see Titchen (1995).
- 3.
The Turkish National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS Turkey) is the national branch of UNESCO’s main consultative organization for cultural World Heritage (ICOMOS International). It focuses specifically on the Turkish system’s adherence to the principles set out in the Venice Charter (1964).
- 4.
The UNESCO Türkiye Millî Komisyonu is an interministerial body affiliated to the Ministry for Culture and Tourism , the Ministry for Education and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. It was founded in 1963.
- 5.
The World Heritage Committee has 21 member states who meet each year in ordinary session to discuss policy orientations relating to the World Heritage Convention, applications, and the management of World Heritage sites.
- 6.
These remarks are drawn from observations carried out particularly at the 39th and 40th sessions of the World Heritage Committee in 2015 and 2016.
- 7.
The intangible cultural heritage program has its own committees and modes of functioning, setting it apart from World Heritage. Nevertheless, reciprocal incentive effects are observable between the two conventions (Bortolotto 2011).
- 8.
The prerogatives of the Koruma, Uygulama ve Denetim Büroları are set out in regulations on the procedures and principles of establishment no. 25842, published in the official gazette on 11.06.2005, article 7.
- 9.
The Kalkınma bölge ajansları, set up after the promulgation of law 5449 in 2006, grant a privileged place to projects to promote tourism in historic urban centers, specifically in the region of south eastern Anatolia.
- 10.
The Mardin Sürdürülebilir Turizm Projesi is a project with €2.2 million of EU funding to develop sustainable tourism (covering actions relating to communication, heritage restoration, and training), with the drawing up of a World Heritage application as one of its objectives.
- 11.
“Civil society actors” is used here to refer to individuals and organizations, set up independently of the state and necessarily interacting with it, who act in the public realm and participate in public policy and actions.
- 12.
The expression Kamu-yerel-sivil-özel is omnipresent in the foundation’s communication material.
- 13.
The Tarihi kentler birliği, placed under the authority of the ÇEKÜL secretariat, is a network of local authorities running programs in which municipalities, governors’ offices, and heritage experts work together.
- 14.
- 15.
Evaluation of the Ani application by ICOMOS international experts mentions in particular that “the official Turkish historiography put forward makes insufficient recognition of Ani’s Armenian past and involves historical inaccuracies” (ICOMOS 2016).
The Nevruz (in Turkish) or Newroz (in Kurdish ) festivities are celebrated each year at the beginning of spring. Their meanings differ in the Turkish, Kurdish , and Persian cultural spheres. The intangible cultural heritage application for “Nevruz” did not recognize the Kurdish version of these festivities in Turkey (Aykan 2014).
- 16.
The conflict may be considered to have started again after the Suruç attack, in which 33 people died in a town on the Turkish/Syrian border on July 20, 2015, as a consequence of which the Kurdistan Workers’ Party assassinated two police officers. The spiral of violence led to armed operations in numerous towns in the Kurdish region of Turkey, which was placed under a ceasefire (including Diyarbakır).
- 17.
By “public policy instruments” I refer to “technical and social mechanisms organizing specific social relations between public authorities and those targeted” (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2004: 13).
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Boucly, J. (2018). World Heritage Manufacture in Turkey and the Introduction of a New Public Policy System. In: Girard, M., Polo, JF., Scalbert-Yücel, C. (eds) Turkish Cultural Policies in a Global World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63658-0_10
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