Current Approaches, Solutions and Practices in Conservation of Cultural Heritage
A Classification-based Assessment of the Unesco Tentative List of Turkiye
Veysel Özbey, Duygu SabanOn the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, the UNESCO World Heritage List currently contains a high number of heritage sites that have begun pushing controllable limits. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has undertaken the responsibility for selecting the heritage sites to be inscribed on the list and has had to develop various restrictions and strategies regarding the list. After the Convention, the 2005 Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention took the first step toward changing the types of classifications of heritage sites on the list and defined four new specific types of heritages. Some revisions were made in the 2008 Operational Guidelines, and minor revisions have been made to the Operational Guidelines up to 2021. This study conducts an analysis based on the heritage classifications found in the Operational Guidelines up to the 2021 revision. The analysis accepts the cultural and mixed heritage sites that have been inscribed on the list since 2009, uses those that have been included in the UNESCO Tentative List of Türkiye (UTLoT) as observations, and examines the distributions for the observations based on classification type. An agglomeration has been observed to be present in the monuments classification, with the number of heritage sites in the Groups of Buildings and Cultural Landscapes classifications remaining proportionally low. In addition, the four heritage sites in UTLoT were seen to not have been included under any classification following the Operational Guidelines instructions. In this context, suggestions have been developed for UTLoT to show a more homogeneous distribution in terms of classification.