Eduardo González
The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, yesterday inaugurated the new extension of the institution in the capital of Turkey, Ankara, which has just been put into operation and will offer Spanish classes starting next March.
The Ankara extension, attached to the Instituto Cervantes in Istanbul, is located on the campus of Baskent University, a renowned private institution with more than 1,700 teachers and 17,000 students annually. This academic activity – which will include classes, workshops and seminars – and the various cultural initiatives will serve to promote the learning of our language in Turkey and reinforce the presence of Spanish culture in that country.
The founder of Baskent University, Mehmet Haberal, and the Spanish ambassador to Turkey, Javier Hergueta, participated in the event along with Luis García Montero. The new extension in Ankara is the result of the collaboration agreement signed last October by the Institute and the aforementioned University.
In addition, the director of Cervantes and the general secretary of the institution, Carmen Noguero Galilea, held a meeting yesterday with Spanish American ambassadors accredited in Turkey, accompanied by Javier Hergueta and Fernando Vara de Rey, director of Cervantes in Istanbul. During this meeting, possible lines of collaboration in the promotion of Spanish and its culture were discussed.
Ankara, with a population of close to six million inhabitants, is the seat of the Turkish Government. It also hosts more than twenty embassies from Ibero-American countries, which will facilitate the hosting of the numerous cultural activities (conferences, exhibitions, book presentations, etc.) organized by the Cervantes Institute of Istanbul, and which can also be held in the political capital of the country.
Baskent University, created in 1994, offers both technical-scientific and art and humanities disciplines in its extensive facilities. It has twelve faculties, a music conservatory, eight institutes, a foreign language school and 22 research centers. As for university studies in languages other than Turkish, it teaches reinforcement classes in English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian and Russian.
The working visit to Turkey will conclude this Thursday at the Instituto Cervantes in Istanbul, where Luis García Montero and Carmen Noguero will meet with the staff. In addition, at the same venue, they will attend the presentation of the Sínora essay. History of the border of Europe and the people who live there, by journalist Andrés Mourenza, who details his experience in Greece and Turkey. The presence of the consuls of several Ibero-American countries is confirmed.
Spanish in Türkiye
The new Ankara extension will complement the work carried out by the Cervantes Institute in Istanbul, the most populated city in Turkey, with great social, cultural and political activity. Since it opened in September 2001, the Instituto Cervantes in Istanbul has seen the number of annual enrollments to learn Spanish double, from 1,803 to more than 3,500.
Spanish is already the second foreign language that most interests students in Turkey and has established itself as the third language for adults, behind English and German, according to the article Spanish in Turkey, prepared in 2021 by the then director of the Istanbul center, Gonzalo Manglano.
Spanish is taught in the vast majority of private schools in the country, where it has become the second most important foreign language after English. Its presence is less in public schools, since it is not yet included in the academic programs of the Turkish Ministry of Education.
Among the reasons for the interest in learning Spanish is the large number of Spanish speakers (almost 500 million native speakers worldwide), including in the United States, or various sociocultural factors, such as soccer, music in Spanish, gastronomy, cinema and television series in our language.
