Dede Korkut Turkish Identity Library

“Dede Korkut Turkish Identity Library

Our library, which we built from the stones of the Bayburt region, is planned as a thematic library. Bayburt is one of the places where the Turkish-Islamic civilization has sprouted on the territory of Anatolia.

In our library there are books belonging to poets and writers of ancient Bayburt literature and Sufism, as well as ideas, research, novels and children’s fairy tales that are classics of Turkish identity.

Our library is also used as a meeting and fairytale room (hekat).

We wanted to have a tiny, even very tiny counterpoint to the post-modern world that has turned our children into the consumption robots of the mechanical world.

I used to listen to fairy tales as a child. There was no smartphone, and there was no TV. And I didn’t have any toys to play with. Our greatest pleasure was to tell each other fairy tales by the light of the gas lamp and listen to the conversations of the elders.

Now in each house there are individual rooms within the concrete walls. The consumer society said make separate rooms for your children! We’ve done. But now the children are all alone in their private rooms and in their digital world.

No one tells tales, no one listens. Neither the chattering elders remained, nor the sleepy-eyed, affectionately kneaded children on their grandfather’s knee.

The little ones and the big ones, they are all now, consuming lives in front of their smartphones and televisions.
Books are sad, conversations are lonely, and fairy tales are unclaimed.”