Istanbul's 24/7 Atatürk Library chosen as Turkey's best

The Atatürk Library near Istanbul's Taksim Square has been chosen as Turkey's best library following an assessment of a jury committee of renowned authors and literary experts including Professor Handan İnci and İhsan Yılmaz.

Offering 24/7 service, the library is run under the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Libraries and Museums Directorate. The jury committee said that the library has a rich collection including those published before 1928.

The Atatürk Library is located at a building constructed by Turkey's largest conglomerate Koç Holding for the 50th anniversary of the republic in 1973. The library was opened in 1939 and moved into the current space later. The location is one of the early republic period libraries that provides service to public and research specialists. More than 600 people visit the library each day.

At the start, the library had around 170,000 publications, mainly donated by some of Turkey's top intellectuals of the time.Today the library has more than 500,000 publications, including books, antique writings, maps, postcards and one of Turkey's largest newspaper and magazine collections. The three-floor hexagonal building was designed in the 1970s by Turkey's award-winning architect Sedad Hakkı Eldem who had an important influence on the country's national style.

The library's rare manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman languages are available at the website "ataturkkitapligi.ibb.gov.tr." Turkey's first library was Beyazıt State Library, which was formed by Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1884 in the Islamic-Ottoman social complex of Beyazıt.