On April 7th, 2026 diyalog presented the European Community Award to the artisans of the Büyük Valide Han in recognition of their collaboration with the artists of the Mahalla Festival – Midas Touch edition.

The award acknowledges the artisans of Büyük Valide Han not only as skilled makers, but as active cultural agents: collaborators, co-authors, and mediators between heritage and contemporary artistic practice. During the Mahalla Festival, the Han became a space where international artists and local craftspeople worked side by side, developing processes rooted in dialogue, experimentation, and mutual learning.

Projects such as Measuring Time with Coffee Spoons by Ieva Kotryna Ski and What Has Man Made of Man by Tbel Abuseridze exemplified this exchange. In these collaborations, traditional techniques and materials—metalwork, copper, gold plating—became integral to conceptual artistic practices, generating works that neither artists nor artisans could have created independently.

Beyond individual works, the collaboration reflects a broader commitment to sustaining Büyük Valide Han as a living ecosystem of craft, memory, and community. The artisans, organized as a non-corporate collective, engage in educational initiatives, workshops, and long-term collaborations that connect local knowledge with international perspectives.

This recognition reinforces Mahalla’s ongoing approach: to create platforms where art and craftsmanship meet on equal ground, and where cultural production is shaped through shared experience rather than isolated authorship.

The European Community Awards Co-create & Comprehend is an annual competition, held by the MagiC Carpets platform and co-funded by Creative Europe.