President Erdoğan: Everything done with the heart is art, a work of art

Highlights from Erdoğan's statements are as follows:

"Each of our people who protect our heritage and spend their lives keeping it alive and passing it on to new generations is essentially a living treasure. As a result of the work we initiated, we have declared a total of 67 heritage bearers as human treasures between 2008 and 2022.

15 of these precious names have passed into eternity, leaving us their masterpiece-quality works as a legacy. Today, I once again commemorate with mercy these masters who kept our culture alive, reinterpreted it, and brought it to large audiences.

We are living in a period where the modern culture industry uses its tools to attack the cultural accumulations of our nation and different societies. Everything done with the heart is art, a work of art. We have human treasure values living in every province of Turkey.

No matter how much satisfaction we feel from this, it is not enough. I believe the secret to this is as follows; it is seen that many of our master artists, who possess God-given skills, keep our values that are on the verge of being forgotten alive with love. Love is for a person to become a path in what they love. Not like today's love. This is true love. May the Lord increase the number of these artists who combine love in their hearts with skill in their hands, and may He not show us their absence.

We live in an age where everything is consumed very rapidly. Along with the technological revolution, profound changes are taking place in human approaches to life, the environment, the world, and art. Digitalization has practically surrounded every field, from economy to finance, from culture to communication. We follow what artificial intelligence can do and what it can achieve sometimes with excitement and sometimes with anxiety.

We are working with all our might to bring this cultural heritage, which is hidden not only abroad but also in Anatolia, to light. We have carried out the most intensive work in our history, especially in the field of archaeology. In our excavation activities, we have fit 60 years' worth of archaeological work into just 4 years. May He grant us the opportunity to leave a stronger and richer cultural treasure to future generations.

"THE 'MORE WESTERN THAN THE WEST' MENTALITY"

The wounds opened in Turkey's cultural life by the 'more Western than the West' mentality, which looks down on its nation and practically loathes its own values and culture, have still not healed.

As we see people who know the music charts of Europe, America, and Far Eastern countries by heart, but do not know a few composers, bards, or masters of words and instruments from their own history, we can see the destruction caused by denial policies much more clearly. We have reunited a total of 12 thousand of our artifacts with our nation and the lands to which they belong.