President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attended the 2019 Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Awards Ceremony at Beştepe Culture and Convention Center.
President Erdoğan made a speech at the ceremony. Underscoring that culture and arts are among the distinctive features of independence just like flag and land, President Erdoğan noted that societies that lack their own works, accumulations and policies of culture and arts are doomed to get crushed under the hegemony, overt or covert, of societies which are powerful in terms of these aspects.
The 2019 Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Awards were granted to the late Nuri Pakdil in the field of literature, to Mazhar-Fuat-Özkan, known as MFÖ, in the field of music, to Mesut Uçakan in the field of cinema, to Devrim Erbil in the field of painting, to Fuat Başar in the field of traditional arts, to Doğan Kuban in the field of architecture, to Ahmet Yaşar Ocak in the field of social sciences, and the Loyalty Award was granted to the late Haluk Dursun.