President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attended the 2020 Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Awards Ceremony at the Presidential Complex.
Delivering a speech at the ceremony, President Erdoğan stressed his happiness to come together with artists, who steer Turkey’s artistic, scientific and cultural life and whose works brighten its path, and said: “I hope the 2020 Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Awards may lead to auspicious developments. I wholeheartedly congratulate our men and women of science, culture and arts to whom we will present their awards.”
Likening the fertile lands of Anatolia to a large folder in terms of artistic creation, President Erdoğan stated: “This is a folder that contains cultures and civilizations piled in files. The zeitgeist, which encapsulates cultures layer by layer, civilizations chunk by chunk, and arts pile by pile from Göbeklitepe, from the Hittites, from Lydia, from Phrygia, from the Roman Empire, from the Byzantine Empire, from the Seljuk Empire and from the Ottoman Empire to the present day, proudly lives on in these lands. Just take a look at our works which, signifying theft of history or identity, end up in museums across the world even though they belong to our geography... Even this alone suffices to prove how vast and deep an artistic heritage our Republic, which nears its centenary, is in possession of as well as the potential this heritage harbors to recreate works adored by the entire world.”