Turkish president honors culture, art award winners

By Gozde Bayar

ANKARA (AA) – Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Thursday honored the achievements of the artists with the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Awards.

The annual award ceremony took place at the presidential complex in the capital Ankara.

Erdogan conferred the award for music to a Turkish pop-rock band MFO with Mazhar Alanson, Fuat Guner and Ozkan Ugur for their representation of cultural identity.

Mesut Ucakan was awarded the cinema prize for lifetime contributions in the field.

The painting award was given to Devrim Erbil for his works related to cultural traditions.

Fuat Basar was honored with the traditional art award for his work in calligraphy and marbling art.

The literature prize was awarded to Nuri Pakdil who died earlier this year.

The architecture award went to Dogan Kuban for his theoretical and conceptual studies on the history of Turkish architecture, restoration activities and his views emphasizing the identity of Turkish works in Islamic architecture.

The award in the field of social sciences was given to Ahmet Yasar Ocak for his academic contributions to Islamic history and cultural historiography.

The loyalty award was presented to former Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Ahmet Haluk Dursun who died in a traffic accident in August in eastern Turkey.

During his speech at the ceremony, Erdogan harshly criticized the awarding of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke.

“The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to a man who praised those killing Muslim Bosniaks contemptibly …” the president said.

Austrian author Handke won the prize despite his denial of the Bosnian genocide claiming the Muslim Bosniaks in Sarajevo had killed themselves.

He also openly supported Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 at the international tribunal in The Hague on trial for war crimes and genocide.

Srebrenica was besieged by Serb forces who were trying to wrest territory from Bosnian Muslims and Croats to form their own state.

More than 8,300 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed after Bosnian Serb forces attacked the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica in July 1995, despite the presence of Dutch troops tasked with acting as international peacekeepers.

Earlier, several countries, including Turkey, boycotted the award ceremony on Tuesday.