President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan inaugurated the Istanbul Medeniyet University Library on Friday, the largest of its kind in the country. The library, sprawling across an area of 28,000 square meters (around 300,000 square feet), will be open to the public as well as to the university's students. The modern library has a capacity of 3,000 people and is located in Üsküdar, on the city’s Asian side. The seven-story building has a capacity of 1 million books and will be open around the clock.
Designed as a smart building with multiple accessibility options, it hosts group study rooms, conference halls, prayer rooms and other social venues. Visitors will also be served free tea, coffee and cookies. The library will also host conferences.
In recent years, Türkiye modernized its libraries and constructed new ones, including a presidential library at the Presidential Complex in the capital Ankara. The latest data from 2021 shows that the country has 34,555 libraries, a number 1.7% higher than 2020. More than 32,000 libraries are owned or operated by institutions of education, mostly universities while the country hosts 1,252 public libraries. The libraries host more than 34 million books. The number of people visiting public libraries also increased by 21% last year and reached to 15.6 million.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Erdoğan said Türkiye was working to add more libraries to more schools, of all grades. He noted that they were planning to convert Rami, a historic barracks in Istanbul, into a library. The Rami Barracks, used as Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid's military headquarters during the Crimean War, was renovated during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II and continued to serve the army during the first years of the republic and completed their military function in the 1960s.
