― 7 апреля 2016 г.

Honour Medal of TURKSOY to Olcas Suleymenov

In a ceremony held in TURKSOY Headquarters on April 7th, 2016, Olcas Suleymenov, the wise man, poet and diplomat of the Turkic World  was offered the Honour Medal of TURKSOY.

At  the award ceremony, TURKSOY Secretary General  Dusen Kaseinov delivered a speech in which he congratulated Olcas Suleymenov on the occasion of his 80th birthday and extended his gratitude to  him for his precious contribution to Turkic art and culture. Following his opening speech, Mr. Kaseinov handed over the Honour Medal of TURKSOY to Olcas Suleymenov. This medal had previously also been handed over to ministers of founding member countries of TURKSOY.

TURKSOY Secretary General Dusen Kaseinov said that as a particularly generous Turkic intellectual, Mr. Olcas Suleymenov devoted his life to uniting the Turkic World and to promoting Turkic language and culture. Mr. Kaseinov also stressed that with his works, Mr. Suleymenov  has scientifically proven that Turkic culture and language have been one of the main sources of development for other languages.

Mr. Kaseinov further said: “Intellectuals are the architects of our future. With their works, illustrious personalities of our history such as Dede Korkut, Yusuf Has Hacip, Kashgarly Mahmut, Khodja Akhmed Yassawi, Hadji Bektash Veli, Ali Shir Nevai and Yunus Emre are shedding a light upon our present and future. They are key personalities of the  history of the Turkic World. Mr.  Sulaymanov, has devoted his life to peace and tolerance, unity, solidarity and justice. Through his academic research activities , Mr. Suleymenov who is one of the most respected wisemen of the Turkic World contributes to the enlightening of his.”

Following the  award ceremony which gathered the Ambassador of the Republic of Kazakhstan to Ankara  H. E. Janseyit Tuymebayev, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the  Akhmed Yassawi University Musa Yıldız along with many other guests, the poet Olcas Suleymenov signed his book of poems entitled “Olcas Suleymenov’s Poems in Turkic Languages” published by TURKSOY and written in 10 languages.

Who is Olcas Suleymenov?

Olcas Suleymenov is a Kazak Turkic linguist, author, poet, geologist and diplomat who was born in 1936 in Almaty the capital of the Kazak Soviet Socialist Republic. His father Omer Suleymenov was a member of the cavalry in Kyzylorda who died in a  battle a few days before Olcas Suleymenov’s birth. A few years after Omer Suleymenov’s death, Olcas’ mother Fatma married the famous Kazak journalist Abdul Ali who played a key role in the education of Olcas Suleymenov as a social scientist, poet and author. Olcas Suleymenov who graduated from a classical highschool of the Sovietic system of that time, pursued his studies at the Faculty of Geology of the Kazak State University. 

In those times, the emphasis of the education system of the Soviet regime was particularly put on  natural sciences, mathematics and technics rather than social sciences. However, Olcas Suleymanov’s stepfather Abdul Ali, the journalist, noticed Olcas’ potential and talent quite quickly and motivated him to focus on literature and poetry at an early age. His first poem and texts were so good that Olcas was sent to study at the Institute of Literature in Moscow, where he later met notable authors, poets and statesmen of the time such as the Consul of Azerbaijan to Istanbul (during Elçibey’s term) Abbas Abdullah Hocalıoğlu, the Uzbek poet Yadigar Abidov, the Yakut poet Vladimir Samyk and many others at the Gorki Institute of Literature.

Suleymenov who focused on nomadic  life patterns of the Kazak people, Kazak history and oral tradition in his first works, later started writing on social anthropology, language and history. Olcas Suleymenov explains this with the following words: "Today, a Turkic poet must also be an author and a research scholar. The heaviest load is always carried in the middle of a caravane, because this is the part of the latter which also carries those who fall. Every generation must work with great zeal and motivation as if it was the last generation of the world. We must also assume the responsibility of facts which our ancestors did not know about or accept. This is what we do and this is also the reason why we work on some subjects which seem useless: we explore Etruscan history, Sumerian archeology and we try to understand Mahenjo-Daro inscriptions and decipher the Scandinavian alphabet".

Thus, Olcas Suleymenov who focused on linguistics, anthropology and history started doing research on Russian epic legends and discovered an extraordinarily rich heritage of Turkic history and  culture. His first works in this field were compiled with the title "Az i ya"  (in English "Me and You " in classic Russian "Me and Me "). This work raised great controversy among the scholars of the Academy of Sciences of Moscow, as well as among scholars and authors of the time. As a scientific work which completely undermined the Russian ideology  of that time, it was not acknowledged by the   Academy of Sciences. However, it left undelible traces in Russian Soviet history and culture and led to a turning point in the identification of Soviet intellectuals of Turkic descent with Russians.

As a matter of fact, ten years later, as the Soviet Union collapsed (1990), Olcas Suleymenov became famous, and this time, his fame reached out to the entire world. Years after his arrival in Moscow, Suleymenov went back to his place of birth in Kazakhstan to carry out geological research. This is also when he noticed that the Aral sea which was the only source of life of Turkestan, had dried up  and that nuclear activities of the Soviet regime had turned the region into hell. As he knew that similar nuclear activities were carried out by the USA and led to the same disastrous situation in Nevada, the land of native Americans, Suleymenov launched an international initiative called “Anti-Nuclear Semey-Nevada”, which was highly appreciated in intellectual spheres and among ecologists.

In 1990, 70 years after the First Congress of the Muslim People of Russia, Suleymenov organized the 1st Congress of Turkic Peoples together with the Turkic linguist and intellectual from Kazan Rafail Muhammeddin and laid the foundations of the future Turkic World.

Olcas Suleymenov who worked as a member of the USSR, Secretary General of the Authors’ Union of Kazakhstan, People’s Representative of the Soviet Union, Chairman of the Committee of Authors of Asia and Africa, Chairman of the Anti-Nuclear Semey-Nevada Initiative, and founding member of the Union of Turkic Peoples, was later appointed as Ambassador of the Republic of Kazakhstan under the leadership of its President Nur Sultan Nazarbayev following its idependence. Mr. Suleymenov is currently assuming the function of Ambassador of the Republic of Kazakhstan to Italy and lives in Rome.

 
Olcas Suleymenov’s work covers a wide range of subjects ranging from literature, languages and history to cinema, as he also worked in Kazak cinema studios for some time. Some of his most important works include poems, novels, linguistic philosophy and research on legends.