Turkish cooking traditions are highlighted every month with the YESAM Recipe of the Month. This month’s featured recipe is “Çökelek Cheese Salad”.

On break for the summer, the lecture season of YESAM will resume in the fall. In the meantime, past lectures are available for online viewing on the TCF Video Gallery.

Dr. Recep Karadag of the TCF Cultural Preservation and Natural Dyes Laboratory-DATU participated in the 24th International Federation of Associations of Textile Chemists and Colorists Congress in Pardubice, Czech Republic on June 13-16. He gave a presentation entitled “Sustainability of Natural Dyes Today.”

The Golden Age of King Midas, a world premier exhibition at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, continues to be on display through November 27, 2016. Supported by a major grant by TCF, the exhibition features artifacts unearthed in the main tumulus in Gordion, as well as a number of important objects from the tumuli in Lydia and Lycia. These pieces appear alongside select examples from the Penn Museum's own collections.

Makam New York's program Turkish Story Time, supported by a TCF grant, continues to present weekly programs in New York City. Turkish Story Time brings children and their caregivers together to learn about Turkish culture through reading stories in Turkish, learning songs, rhymes, and riddles, introducing instruments and advancing literacy. The program is recorded every Thursday at 4:00 pm at Book Culture on Columbus in New York City and is open to the public. The recordings, stories and materials are available on Makam New York’s website.

The Glass Furnace Foundation in Istanbul, a TCF grantee institution and artist scholarships recipient since 2006, featured the works of 18 glass artists from Turkey and all over the world who participated in the Foundation’s “Artist in Residence” program this year. Several TCF supported artists were featured at the exhibition which remained on view from June 7-18 at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Tophane-i Amire Culture and Art Center. They included glass artists Agâh Barış Can Aksakal (TCF Cultural Exchange Fellow-2012), Meral Değer (TCF SOFA featured artist-2011, 2013, 2014) and TCF Artist Grant recipient (2009) Gülin Algül.

Dr. Muhammed Emin Soydaş (TCF Academic Fellow-2016), a faculty member at Çankırı Karatekin University’s Music Department, presented his paper entitled “Exploring Motivic Features for Understanding Modal Structure: The Case of Seventeenth-Century Turkish Vocal Songs” at the Fourth International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music (AAWM 2016) at The New School, College of Performing Arts in New York City on June 10, 2016.

Composer Dr. Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol (TCF Grantee and Academic Fellow-2013), conducted his Opera “Othello in the Seraglio: The Tragedy of Sümbül the Black Eunuch” at the Shalin Liu Performance Center at the 35th Annual Rockport Chamber Music Festival on June 12, 2016.

Cemil Batur Gökçeer (TCF Cultural Exchange Fellow-2012), an independent photographer, participated in a group exhibition entitled "Paranın Gözü Kör Olsun" at the Siyah Beyaz Gallery in Ankara from June 20 to June 30, 2016.

Saz player Mansur Bildik (TCF Cultural Exchange Fellow-2016), performed with Prof. Dr. Adnan Koç, Prof. Haydar Tanrıverdi, and the Mansur Bildik Ensemble at the Festsaal der Bezirksvorstehung Landstrasse in Wien, Austria on June 21, 2016.