By Manal Abdel Fattah
The Yunus Emre Institute “Turkish Cultural Center”, in cooperation with the Turkish Chancellery in Cairo, held an event entitled “Turkish Asbela in Cairo”, which included a symposium by researcher Sarah Al-Nadi, and a display of video clips of a number of Asbola that were established in Cairo during the Ottoman era.
The event was attended by the educational advisor at the Turkish Embassy, Dr. Ibrahim Aslan, the director of the Turkish Cultural Center, Emin Poyraz, and a group of professors and academics at Egyptian universities, inaddition to the center’s students.
In a speech he delivered during the event, the Director of the Cultural Center, Amin Poyraz, pointed out that there is a mutual interest between the Egyptian and Turkish peoples in each other’s culture, as the two peoples are sons of one civilization.
“We can see the same cultural heritage in both Istanbul and Cairo, which indicates the great cultural entanglement and fusion between the two countries,” Poyraz said.
He added: “Through our activities, we seek to shed light on elements of the common heritage, in order to make it a destination for tourists and a subject for academic research.”
For his part, educational advisor Ibrahim Aslan said that Egypt has a special structure that has enabled it to be the origin of all the world’s civilizations and their progress in various fields, and a center for Islamic intellectual and cultural heritage,” noting that the avenues in Cairo have contributed to this as part of Turkish cultural and intellectual awareness.
During the symposium, archaeological researcher Sarah Al-Nadi gave a presentation of the decorative elements that adorn the facades of Ottoman-style fountains in Cairo, and the Ottoman inscriptions engraved on them.
The researcher pointed out that “these writings did not only add artistic value to the facades of the avenues, but also added historical and literary value because of the information they contain about the monument, and poems that carry with them the aesthetics of Ottoman Turkish poetry.”
The researcher confirmed that the Turkish fountains located in Cairo represent a cultural manifestation that bears witness to the literary, cultural, artistic, social, and architectural interaction between Egypt and the center of the Ottoman Empire.
The Al-Sabil facility, whose construction was intended to provide water to the thirsty and thirsty on the streets without payment, was originally an Egyptian facility that moved to Istanbul and later spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, and its architecture was developed at the hands of the Ottomans.
