The historic Rami Artillery Quarters, built in the 1770s in Eyup district on the European side of the city, will be converted into a library with a capacity of 7 million books.<\/p>\n
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced the project last week during a fast-breaking dinner in the capital Ankara. The project is also mentioned in the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party\u2019s election manifesto.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are making efforts to encourage our generation to [read] books,\u201d Erdogan said at an event in Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Coskun Yilmaz, provincial director of culture and tourism, said: “The plan is to construct Turkey’s biggest library and book valley. Once [the project is] completed it will also be a candidate for the biggest library in the world.”<\/p>\n
The library will have reading rooms, exhibition halls, cafes, cinemas, and stores.<\/p>\n
“There will be spaces inside where visitors can sit and spend long hours,\u201d Yilmaz said.<\/p>\n
The library will host a section for children and collectors, and hold books on art and the city.<\/p>\n
A museum will tell visitors the history of books starting from the invention of paper, said Yilmaz.<\/p>\n
The parking lot will have capacity of 1,250 vehicles.<\/p>\n
The project, expected to cost 200 million Turkish Liras [$43.3 million], will open in 2020.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Istanbul, a sprawling city of 15 million people, will soon open its doors to the country’s largest public library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":61168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,174,173],"tags":[6745,77993,77182],"class_list":["post-61166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-turkey-daily","category-turkey-headlines","tag-istanbul","tag-library","tag-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}