Sibel Talay, Fahri Aral and Celal Metin Zeynioğlu from Istanbul, members of The Turkish Publishers Association, were supported with the Turkey-Armenia Travel Grant to visit Yerevan, to build relations between the publishers of the countries, to discuss possible permanent strategies for promoting Armenian publishers to their counterparts in Turkey.
Sibel Talay
“The team whom we met in Armenia organized a great program for us. We had acquaintance meetings with the Armenian Publisher’s National Association and main publishing houses. We shared information about both countries’ publishing sectors. Also, we discussed possible ways of cooperation. Especially we came to an agreement that especially collaboration on children books and children literature would serve positively for the normalization process.”
Fahri Aral
“By means of this trip we had the chance to get closely acquainted with the details of a very important matter which for us has been a closed book and also somehow a “taboo” and with our publisher friends from whom we have always “stood aloof”.”
Celal Metin Zeynioğlu
“I believe that face to face contacts of two communities and them getting to know each other are both very important for the normalization of relations. Speaking to one other face to face, seeing where they live and work is very crucial to see that there are not so many differences between two communities and have common grounds too.”
“Our travel is the first step. In the future we are willing to collaborate publishing sectors and increase mutual translation between two languages, if we can make these happen we will achieve more steps for the normalization process, because books are the carriers of culture.”