The importance of conservation education in fine arts faculties in Turkey during EU membership

A. Sultan KARAOGLU SAHIN¹, Saadet GUNER²

(¹Inönü University , Malatya, Turkey / ²Friends of Cultural Heritage (FOCUH) Association, Istanbul, Turkey)

Although protection and restoration of cultural heritage is a new profession for Turkey, it is seen as the profession of the time in developed countries. Although, Turkey is one of the countries having the richest cultural heritage in the world, the number of experts restorer is just a few.
It is already known that Turkey, as part of her attempts to gain full membership into the EU, is in the process of compensating her infrastructural deficiencies and adapting her superstructural institutions to the EU norms. We are also aware of our significant deficiencies at our universities. One of them is the absence of “Training on Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art” at universities. Although there is such a training procedure in a lot of countries within the EU, there is unfortunately no such department dealing with “Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art” at any of the Faculties of Fine Arts in Turkey. This case leads to negative impacts on the conservation of our cultural heritage.”
When education regarding planning and approaches of education on protection in European countries is studied, it is seen that the education is offered in primarily three branches mainly architecture, archaeology and fine arts at higher education level in the said countries. However, in Turkey are offered only by “Department of Restoration” in faculties of architecture. In addition to, “the Department of Protection and Restoration of Tangible cultural Properties” was established at Faculty of Science and Arts of Istanbul University in 1993. In contrary, there are no departments on “conservation of works of arts” at any faculties of fine arts, of which number is about 38 in Turkey. In this paper, this subject and the importance of the “Department of Restoration” in faculties of Fine Arts and conservation will be examined in detail.

Purpose: The main pupose of this work is to raise up the conservation education in Turkey to the EU level and to find out solutions to the main problems in cultural heritage conservation by means of education planning.
Methodology/Approach: This congress is supposed to be an important media to discuss several studies concerning our subject. It is planned to compare the conservation education in EU and in Turkey first. Then, an appropriate curriculum for the conservation of fine arts to be set up and to be discussed accordingly.
Results: To increase the number of professionals for the conservation of cultural heritage by means of education. To discuss (evaluate) approaches and advanced methods as well.

Keywords: Conservation education, cultural heritage, Turkey, conservation of works of arts