“The Story of Turkey Afghanistan Friendship through Historical Documents” Exhibition by TİKA

Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA) organized an exhibition titled “Nearing Three Hundred Years under the Sky, the Story of Turkey-Afghanistan Friendship through Historical Documents” in Afghanistan’s city of Herat.

Organized by TİKA, the exhibition, which displays the bilateral relations between Turkey and Afghanistan through concrete documents dating from the mid-18^th century to the 1940s, was opened in Herat Allama Seljuki Exhibition Hall. The exhibition, which was met with great interest by the local people, started with a recital of the Quran, and later a presentation was given on the exhibition and Turkey-Afghanistan relations.  

The exhibition features 104 documents, which showcase all aspects of the nearly three hundred years of relations between the two countries that started simultaneously with the rise of Afghanistan as a national country, their Dari and Turkish summaries and their partial translations in Dari. In the exhibition, the documents regarding the aids sent by the Afghan State and people during the Italo-Turkish War, Great Istanbul Fire and Turkish War of Independence, were especially striking. The documents on display were collected from R.T. Ottoman Archives, Turkish Republican Archive, Presidential Archives, Turkish Red Crescent Archives, and other archives.

Abdulghani Niksyer, who is a retired fellow of the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan and currently conducting research on the history of Herat, said, “This exhibition demonstrated that a healthy recollection of the Afghan history is not possible without Turkish sources.”