The ministry has restored many historic buildings, including mosques, tombs and külliyes (social complexes adjacent to mosques), in the Balkans. Turkish Monuments Project in Mongolia, which aims to bring the old spirit of the Ottoman Empire back to the region where the Orkhon inscriptions, the earliest known Turkic texts, are located, has been completed.
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has launched another project in Egypt to restore the house of Mehmet Akif Ersoy, who wrote Turkey’s national anthem. Ersoy lived in Cairo between 1925 and 1935. If the ministry convinces the current owner of the house to sell it, there are plans to turn the building into a museum dedicated to the memory of Ersoy. The ministry is also working to eliminate a procedural problem it has encountered regarding the restoration of Murat Reis Külliye on the island of Rhodes.
Another historic site to be restored is an Ottoman clock tower in Mexico, where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited in December. Visiting the clock tower, which was a gift from Sultan Mehmet V in 1910 but has since fallen into disrepair, Erdoğan called on the ministry to include the clock tower on the list of historic buildings to be restored abroad. The restoration work on the clock tower is to be finished in 2010, which is the 200th anniversary of Mexico’s declaration of independence from Spain.
In addition to these, there are plans to establish mutual cultural centers in Turkey and Macedonia. Reconstruction work on the Kurşunlu Han in Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, and of a flat in the Seyran apartment building in İstanbul’s Taksim district have already begun. The restoration of Üsküp Mustafa Paşa Mosque in Macedonia and Zincirli Medrese and Hacı Giray Han Tomb in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea have been recently completed.
