Turkey and Catalonia share common sea and culture

The final event involving Catalan Culture as the 2007 Guest of Honour was the handover of the symbolic ‘GuestScroll’ to Turkey, the 2008 Guest of Honour. Prior to the exchange between Anna Soler-Pont, commissioner of Catalan culture, and Ümit Yaşar Gözüm, Turkish coordinator for the Guest of Honor program, Book Fair Director Juergen Boos praised this Fair’s series of Catalan events, saying, “This year we have collected a world that is not well known,” and expressed high hopes for next year.

The event began with a speech by the Catalan novelist Baltasar Porcel entitled ‘Books, Heaven and Earth,’ in which he highlighted the fact that Catalonia and Turkey may appear to be geographically and culturally distant, but share the Mediterranean Sea – what the Ottoman’s called ‘the White Sea.’ It is, Porcel said, ‘a region that has attracted ‘a multiplicity of peoples and languages.’

‘These age-old populations have always been linked together, interrelated,’ he continued, and ‘There are in this sea and universe as many different shores and locales as there are waves that wash up upon them, mingling them together as one.’

We are all, Porcel asserted - ‘the children of Odysseus, who from the eastern sea won the west at the tremulous tiller of his black ship, conquering one-eyed monsters and loving the most lascivious goddesses of his time.’ It creates what he described as a ‘polytheistic culture’ with a complex exchange of ideas – one for which the Frankfurt Book Fair itself serves as a suitable metaphor.

Turkish writer Elif Shafak, who first offered a reading from her novel Araf, said she embraced Porcel’s assertion, saying that the same idea of multiplicity was reflected in the logo that was designed for next year, which incorporates a multitude of colors. ‘The European and Asian worlds come together in Turkey and we want to bring this world with us to Frankfurt,’ she said.

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