Was for Bilbao is the Guggenheim Museum, for Eskisehir is the Museum of Modern Art. Designed by the Japanese star architect Kengo Kuma, the building with the horizontal wooden panels has been the eye-catcher at the entrance to the old town for three years. Exhibits by international artists are currently on display in the minimalistically designed rooms, which deal with how attitudes towards the human body are changing. On the ground floor, the museum restaurant only offers vegan cuisine. Before he came to Eskisehir, the chef Halil Cem Erdogan cooked on Rügen.
The wide steps leading up to the museum are perfect for selfies and group pictures. Many coaches come from the neighboring provinces of western Anatolia. They travel from Istanbul and Ankara with the Intercity. Because Eskisehir attracts with a wide range of leisure activities. From the museum, the streets lead to the old town, where many of the more than thirty museums are housed. Among them are the first wax museum, Turkey’s first hammam museum and the Museum of Modern Glass Art.
They were all created in the past fifteen years. Entrepreneur Erol Tabanca has donated the OMM modern art museum to his hometown. Community spirit is just one of the qualities that characterize this city of just under a million people. Eskisehir is also an example of what local politics can achieve in a centralized country like Turkey.
The central government does not make it easy
Turkey talks about this city, many see it as a model. In studies on the quality of life, it occupies top places; for the fifth consecutive year, students voted Eskisehir the country’s most popular university town; UNESCO included it in 2016 as the first Turkish city in its Learning Cities network; it is the only Turkish city that can afford a symphony orchestra. The local economy addresses the shortage of skilled workers with its own system of dual education.
Just forty or fifty years ago, like many other cities in Anatolia, his hometown was gray and muddy, says MP Utku Cakirözer from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). Then the current mayor, Yilmaz Büyükersen, invented the city as it is today. He has been in office since 1999, longer than any other mayor in the country.
The central government does not make it easy for him. The governors who are appointed by the Home Secretary and who are above him in the hierarchy do not speak to him. They disregard the development plans passed by the city council. And since Büyükersen belongs to the CHP, unlike the AKP municipalities, Eskisehir does not receive any funds from Ankara. This is all the more serious because Turkish city administrations do not levy their own taxes, but finance themselves from rental income, fees and fines – and expand their scope with the help of the social commitment of their citizens.
When Büyükersen became mayor, he was already 62 years old. That’s when his second career began. Before that, at the age of 36, he had been appointed professor at the business school in his hometown, nine years later he became the founding rector of the new Anadolu University. Its campus is one of the largest in Turkey.
For young people who, not least because of the sluggish expansion of the education system, had little chance of getting an academic education, he founded the country’s first distance learning university, with a branch in Cologne. Cassettes were recorded for the lessons and television channels were set up. More than two million young people have so far left the distance learning university with a diploma.
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