FRESH off of gaining two new entries to the UNESCO World Heritage List, Turkey is more eager than ever to exercise greater caution regarding access to ancient sites.
“A balance must be achieved between attracting tourists keen to visit Turkey’s classical heritage and protecting ancient sites from being harmed,” Professor Neslihan Dostoğlu, head of Istanbul Kültür University’s Architecture Department, said in the wake of the northwestern city of Bursa and its historical Cumalıkızık district being added to the UNESCO World Heritage List last month in Doha.
Having presided over the UNESCO project for Bursa and Cumalıkızık, Dostoğlu said a more controlled and conscious protection of the areas would take place under the United Nations body.
The professor said a balance must be struck, as about 2.5 million overnight stays took place in Bursa in 2013 alone, excluding the number of tourists visiting the city in daytrips according to data from the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry.
Turkey has been keen to preserve its heritage amid recent examples of mass tourism damaging unique sites.
In 2012, an ancient Mayan stone temple at Tikal, Guatemala, was damaged by tourists flocking to the site for an “end of the world” party.
Tourist hordes have also been warned off by local people on the remote Pacific Ocean destination of Easter Island – home to hundreds of mysterious carved stone heads.
Noting that they had to submit a report every five years to the UNESCO committee over the condition of their sites, Dostoğlu said the new designation will make the city more careful about its heritage,
preventing building or construction work which might harm the silhouette of the historical view.
“One has to offer a management plan to UNESCO while applying. So, when we presented the Bursa field management plan to the committee, we specified the regions with a core field, which is the actual region under UNESCO’s protection and a protection field to make sure that the core field will be protected,” Dostoğlu said.
Amid the worldwide fears over damage to heritage sites, Turkey’s Permanent Representative to UNESCO, Ambassador Huseyin Avni Botsalı, said Turkey should be regarded as a super-state in the world with its civilization and cultural heritage and not as a developing-world country anymore.”
Turkey is now among the top 15 countries in terms of entries on the UNESCO list with 13 sites.
According to Botsalı, the ancient city of Ephesus near İzmir and the black basalt walls of Diyarbakir in Turkey’s southeast could be added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015.
To be included on the World Heritage List, sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one out of 10 selection criteria of which the first is to represent a “masterpiece of human creative genius.”