Culture, art award winners honored at ceremony
ANKARA
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Dec. 12 honored the achievements of artists with the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Awards.
The annual award ceremony took place at the presidential complex in the capital Ankara. The awards are distributed every year by the state to Turkish and foreign artists and institutions that contribute and honor Turkish culture and art.
Erdoğan conferred the award for music to a Turkish pop-rock band MFÖ with Mazhar Alanson, Fuat Güner and Özkan Uğur for their representation of cultural identity.
Mesut Uçakan 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 Başar 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 Doğan 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 Yaşar Ocak for his academic contributions to Islamic history and cultural historiography.
The loyalty award was presented to former Deputy Culture and Tourism Minister Ahmet Haluk Dursun who died in a traffic accident in August in eastern Turkey.
During his speech at the ceremony, Erdoğan 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 Bosnians 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.