The research book “Edirne’s Tombstones “, which compiles the examples of burial stones reflecting the most concrete practices of Turkish art, is on sale in distinguished bookstores on February 25.
It took 2.5 years for the 640-page comprehensive research to become a book, written by Cem Altınel and designed by Devrim Yamanç. Examples of tombstones in Edirne reflect the most concrete practices of Turkish art. With its epitaphs and decorations, it offers a lot of data explaining the culture, art, science, literature, politics, military, economy, trade, bureaucracy, and social life level of Edirne in the Ottoman period.
The book, published by Maestro Reklamcılık, brings to light a series of aesthetic images of cultures from different ethnic origins such as Turkish, Greek, Jewish, Armenian, Levantine, and Bulgarian that lived together in Edirne for hundreds of years and transferred to the tombstones by stone carving masters (hakkâk) from Edirne.
This project, supported by UZMAR with a sense of social responsibility, is aimed to reach and protect cultural values.
The care given to the tombstone is also a reflection of the love for the person lying in the burial. Compared to the tombs that have been reduced to almost a single type today, the meticulously handled burials of the past centuries draw attention to the intensity of the love and longing that people feel for their relatives. In other words, people describe their feelings for their loved ones with the burial stones they had made for them in the past centuries. This suggests that the relations in that period were deeper in terms of love and respect than today.
As human beings cannot accept death, they preferred to avoid even the thought of death. Even today, there is a feeling of coldness towards death and the words that evoke it. Instead of using the word “died” in the simplest way to end a life, “he died”, we try to describe it with words like “he got the mercy of the right”, “he left us”, “life for you”, “deceased”, “did farewell”, “passed away”. In this context, the concepts of burial and burial stone were thought and designed as images of permanence and continuity, couplets, poems, and texts reflecting this desire were engraved on the Stones as Erkan Kaya wrote. It is known that information such as the father’s name, occupation, date of death is reflected on the tombstone to remember the buried person. Documentary inscriptions enable us to make various inferences as a source of information and enable us to illuminate different points.
Social responsibility with UZMAR sensibility
UZMAR Shipping CEO Noyan Altuğ noted that contributing to projects with quality is their company philosophy and they are happy to sign another project that makes a difference. We care about spending what we earn from the sea for the development and training of Turkish Maritime. As UZMAR Uzmanlar Maritime, we have achieved many firsts in our sector, and we are happy to sign another project that makes a difference in social responsibility projects.
As the Altuğ Family, we shared the dreams of twenty young people who rowed for 19 days from Istanbul to Samsun on the centennial of May 19, 1919. We have made it a company philosophy to contribute in the country and abroad with qualified projects for the protection of cultural assets in all geographies of our country. In this context, we supported the inclusion of the book Edirne’s Burial Stones among Turkish publications due to the importance of the subject although we have no interest in Edirne. How happy for us if we succeeded!.