Globalization enabled people to learn about the world in which they live than ever before in the past. Today’s global culture is determined by a rapidly growing communication network, expanding extend of knowledge and information and advancing technologies. As a consequence, sustainability of local natural environments and cultural heritages becomes a global issue, while local sites become learning grounds for global communities.

Situated between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, Turkey constitutes a melting pot of peoples and cultures where geography and history have, since time immemorial, fused the destinies of Europe, Asia and Africa, while at the same time fashioning the original identity in which one finds both unity and diversity of the Turkish nation.   

Istanbul stands out as the main scene of the momentous events that have left their mark on this phase of history, as the place that has seen the spiritual, artistic and intellectual flowering of its major episodes.

    As Byzantium, it witnessed the successive presence of the Greeks, the Persians and the Romans before becoming the centre of the Eastern Roman Empire, under the name of Constantinople, and then of the Ottoman Empire, under the name of Istanbul, and finally of the Turkish Republic founded by Atatürk. Uniquely, Christianity and Islam chose in turn to make it their capital. Amidst the changing fortunes of war and peace, it has gradually grown into a city of many aspects that marries the sense of the grandiose, emanating from its surrounding walls, with the marks of opulence manifest in its palaces; a city where the symbols of spirituality embodied in its churches and mosques, alternate with those betokening a love of learning, incarnate in its universities and schools.

 
Some 700 kilometres from Istanbul, In ancient Cappadocia, the Valley of Göreme is the site of one of the most fascinating testimonies to the Byzantine Age. The landscape bristles with gigantic needle and cone-shaped rock formations that reach up to the sky as if in prayer, seemingly predestined for meditation since the beginning of time.