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The Museum of the Iron Gates Region and the Center for Turkish Studies - Faculty of History, University of Bucharest, are organizing on Saturday, in the Multifunctional Pavilion, on the occasion of the National Day of the Republic of Turkey, the event Adakale Lives, dedicated to the memory of the submerged island Ada Kaleh, which will include a round table and the opening of a photo-documentary exhibition, all marking 54 years since the evacuation of the population from the island.
Museographer Victor Bunoiu declared for AGERPRES that the Museum of the Iron Gates Region is thus starting the Patrimonium Drobetense monthly conferences, through which specialists from museums and cultural institutions from the county, but also from the country, will bring to the attention of the general public the cultural heritage of Mehedinti.
"Our goal is to make more and more people know the stories of the area and to realize that the archaeological, architectural, ethnographic, natural, industrial or even gastronomic heritage is not something abstract, which concerns only specialists in the field. On the contrary, it is an asset of all of us, part of our identity and we are responsible to know it and protect it," says Victor Bunoiu, Agerpres informs.
The Director of the Center for Turkish Studies of the University of Bucharest, Silvana Rachieru, points out that 54 years ago the history of Ada Kaleh Island ended under the waters of the Danube.
"The island, located in the Turnu Severin area, was submerged in 1970, as a result of the construction of the Iron Gates Dam. In 1968, the islanders lived their last spring on Ada Kaleh (the Fortress Island, in Turkish). The inhabitants, around 680, mostly of Turkish ethnicity, were evacuated and had a choice between settling in Romania or Turkey. Today, we meet members of the Ada Kaleh community in Orsova, Turnu Severin, Constanta, Alba Iulia, Bucharest, but also in Istanbul, Edirne, Ankara, Izmir, Eskisehir. They even established a virtual communication channel, a Facebook page called ADAKALE yasiyor!/ ADAKALE lives! The history of the island, but also the course of the community there are the subjects of the complex meeting that we propose to the public, at the end of October," points out Silvana Rachieru, in a press release of the Museum, sent to AGERPRES on Friday.
In the first part of the meeting, the exhibition of cultural goods from the heritage of the Museum of the Iron Gates Region, the Ada - Kaleh fund, pieces classified in the Fund and Treasury legal categories will be presented.
"Integrated to the purpose of this event, the exhibition is an ethnographic narrative that can also be considered a representative history of the isolated Turkish-Muslim community, a crossing of more than 100 years that shows how inventive the inhabitants of the island were, how much they loved beauty and what crafts had Turkish ethnicity," explains Florentina Pleniceanu, head of the Ethnography and Folk Art Section of the Museum of the Iron Gates Region.
The exhibition Adakale lives! was the messenger of the story of the islanders who chose Turkey as their new home, in an itinerant project, organized between 2014 and 2015, by the Romanian Cultural Institute Istanbul, in Izmir, Canakkale, Thessaloniki, Edirne and Istanbul, and in 2018, in Bucharest, in an event coordinated by the Yunus Emre Turkish Cultural Institute and the Center for Turkish Studies. In 2021, the exhibition was hosted by the Venice Humanities Institute of Culture and Research.
