"Water in Istanbul and Beyond: Past, Present, and Future" international symposium that we organized was on March 14, 2023. Çiğdem Özkan Aygün was a co-applicant on the international project on behalf of ITU and she managed the interdisciplinary research project titled “Water in Istanbul: Rising to the Challenge?”, which began in 2021. The main supporters for this research are the British Academy- Knowledge Frontiers International Interdisciplinary Research and the research brings together archaeologists, engineers and historians from the University of Edinburg, Northumbria University and our own Istanbul Technical University. The aim of the project is to investigate water management infrastructure in Istanbul and to see how past practices can provide solutions to current problems.
As we mentioned in our article in the Heritage Turkey 2022 issue (
https://biaa.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HT12-13-Water-management.pdf), we created a GIS (Geographic Information System) infrastructure with the protocol we made between ITU and ISKI and the maps provided by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Data obtained from previous surface surveys conducted under Dr. Çiğdem Özkan Aygün’s leadership, works by Hülya Tezcan and Kazım Çeçen, Ottoman maps, and archive scans by myself were processed onto the GIS system. The missing information was complemented with GPR scans conducted by our university's faculty member Dr. Caner İmren and Research Assistant Beril Karadöller in Sultanahmet.
Four workshops were held with the participation of relevant institutions such as Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, district municipalities, ISKI, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to discuss the current water problems and propose solutions.