Yunus Kandym

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Yunus Kandym 1959-2005

Today in the Reading Hall of the Library, a newly published edition of a book translated from Ukrainian into Crimean Tatar was presented to the Library and the media. The translation was the work of Crimean Tatar poet Yunus Kandym, who died in 2005.



Yunus Kandym was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1959. From 1976 to 1981, he studied Crimean Tatar language at the Tashkent State Pedagogical Institute. In 1981, he went to work for the Crimean Tatar newspaper, Lenin Banner, first as a reporter, and later as a department head. In 1989 his family moved to Crimea, where he began work on the newspaper Crimean. He became a member of the Journalist Union in 1986 and the Writers’ Union in 1990 and also worked as a translator.

Yunus Kandym’s first poem was published in Tashkent in 1979. Nine years later his first book of poetry was published. He went on to publish several books of poetry and his poems are found in numerous collections in Russian, Ukrainian, and Crimean Tatar languages. He received the award of Honored Culture Worker of Ukraine and is often quoted in Turkish writings. Yunus Kandym died in 2005 at the age of 45.

Display of Yunus Kandym's work in the Reading Hall of the Library.
Publisher of the Crimean Tatar translation of Mikael Kotsubinsky.
Yunus Kandym's wife talks about the poet's life.

Crimean Tatar: A "severely endangered" language

The Crimean Tatar language is listed as “severely endangered” in the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Disappearing Languages. They estimate that, if nothing is done, half of the 6000 plus languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century.
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Why should we care? This is what UNESCO says:
“Every language reflects a unique world-view with its own value systems, philosophy and particular cultural features. The extinction of a language results in the irrecoverable loss of unique cultural knowledge embodied in it for centuries, including historical, spiritual and ecological knowledge that may be essential for the survival of not only its speakers, but also countless others.”

Please consider donating to the Crimean Tatar Cultural and Language Preservation project and help at least one of those endangered languages survive. Click here to donate.

And if you haven’t taken the opportunity to check out the Gasprinsky Library’s website, please do—you can click on it under Websites of Interest. The website is in Crimean Tatar and Russian, but with the aid of Google Translate, you can read much of the site in English. The Library just started a children’s section on their website with games, fairy tales, and coloring books, all in Crimean Tatar, along with the Crimean Tatar Cyrillic alphabet. It is estimated only 5% of Crimean Tatar children speak their native language. This is just one more effort on the part of the Library to fulfill its mission to preserve and revitalize the Crimean Tatar language and culture.

Children at the Gasprinsky Library learn about the children's books in Crimean Tatar.
The Crimean Tatar television station, ATR, interviews one young reader.

Help support the work of the Gasprinsky Crimean Tatar Library!

Now you have an opportunity to support the work of the Gasprinsky Library by making a tax exempt donation through the Peace Corps website. Just click on the link on the right, and it will take you directly to the listing of our project on the Peace Corps website.

Your donation will help fund a project of the Library to digitize their archival documents and make them available on their website. More on this project:

Since its founding twenty years, the Gasprinsky Crimean Tatar Library has become the central repository of documents by and about the Crimean Tatar people. It now has a collection of over 40,000 documents, including more than 8000 in the Crimean Tatar language. The Library has an archival department to which well-known Crimean Tatar political leaders, intellectuals, artists, writers and poets have donated their personal papers. However, as an institution of the Ukrainian government, the Library suffers from a severe lack of funds to do anything beyond pay salaries and maintain the building. Many of the documents of the Library are in urgent need of preservation, particularly in a digital form that would give them a much wider audience. With this project, we hope to raise $3000 which would allow the Library to purchase a small flatbed paper scanner for the numerous archival paper documents—letters, writings, notes, etc—and also to purchase digital scans of some of the Library’s microfilms. The Library is particularly interested in purchasing scans of the microfilms of the newspaper Terdzhman, published from 1883 to 1918 by the Muslim educator and reformer Ismail Gasprinsky, whom the Library is named after. The digital copies then would be made available to Library patrons through the Library’s computers and to readers and researchers worldwide via the Library’s website.

Please consider making a small donation to support this vital work in the continuing mission of the Library to preserve the Crimean Tatar language and culture. Thank you.

Ramiz Netovkin, 1960-2011

In the long hallway of the Library that connects the different offices, a space has been made for exhibits of the work of local Crimean Tatar artists. The current exhibit shows the work of a well-known graphic artist, Ramiz Netovkin, who died recently at the age of 51. Netovkin was born in Tashkent on June 21, 1960. In 1975, he came to Simferopol. He studied painting at the Simferopol College of Art in the name of H.C. Samokisha and graduated in 1980. Since 1983 his work has been included in numerous regional, national, and international exhibits, including solo exhibits in New York, Russia, Germany, Turkey, Poland, and Estonia. Ramiz Netovkin worked as a graphic artist, and in 1989 he became a member of the Union of Ukrainian Artists. He was awarded the designation of Honored Artist of Crimea.
Ramiz Netovkin lived in the nearby small city of Belagorsk. He died July 16, 2011, after suffering a heart attack in the earlier part of the year. Currently there is a retrospective exhibit of his work at the Crimean Tatar Museum of Art in Simferopol.

Developing Volunteerism mini-seminars in Crimea

In the week of October 17th, my counterpart at the library, Nadjie Yagya, and I traveled to three central libraries in Crimea and two branch libraries to present mini-seminars on the topic of volunteerism in libraries and communities. As part of our Peace Corps sponsored Small Projects Assistance (SPA) grant, these mini seminars were a follow-up from the two-day seminar/training we held in Simferopol on May 24th and 25th (see the May 30th blog post for a description of that seminar). Accompanied by library staff who provided information about the work of the Gasprinsky Library, Nadjie and I presented information about the concept of volunteerism and the opportunities it can provide for a library. Included in the seminar was a presentation on American libraries and how volunteer organizations—called “Friends of the Library”—assist libraries in America, from fundraising to providing an extra helping hand with library tasks.

Volunteerism, an accepted practice in America where a large percentage of the population do some kind of volunteer work, is slowly taking hold in post-Soviet countries. The goal of our SPA grant was to promote volunteerism in Crimea through developing volunteerism in Crimean libraries. As I listened to Nadjie discussing various volunteer ideas and watched the seminar participants avidly listen, take notes, and ask many questions, I felt hopeful that at least the idea of volunteerism, and what it can do for their libraries, was planted in the minds of many librarians.

At the branch library in the Crimean Tatar village of Ismail Bey, Nadjie and I and Susanna from Gasprinsky Library pose for a photo with the director of this small library (middle) and librarian from the Evpatoria library (far left).
Participants at the Bakchiseray Central Library.
At the Evpatoria Central Library, Nadjie and I present a slide show on volunteerism in American libraries (that's a young Barack Obama in the Harvard University Library).
At the regional library and Crimean Tatar Cultural Center in the town of Cuvorovckoe, Nadjie and I discuss library volunteerism with the director over tea.
At the Saki Central Library, participants avidly take notes.

Inci Bowman comes to the Gasprinsky Library

Inci Bowman with Crimea Rada Deputy Cafure Kadzhametova and Gulnara Yayaeva, Library Director.

On the afternoon of October 13th, the Gasprinsky Library was honored with a visit from Inci Bowman from the United States. Inci Bowman is past president of the International Committee on Crimea (ICC). Through her writings on the ICC website and the ICC list serve, Inci Bowman has for me become the voice of the Crimean Tatar diaspora in the United States. I attribute much of what I know about the Crimean Tatar people to her informative and elegant writing. I had looked forward to meeting her and was disappointed we did not have more time together, but I was happy to put a face with the writings that have so enriched my life these past two years.
Dr. Bowman was in Simferopol as a guest speaker at an international conference on the history of women in Crimea dedicated to the 125th anniversary of the birth of Sefiki Gasprinsky, the daughter of Ismail Gasprinsky. Dr. Bowman was born in Istanbul and speaks fluent Turkish. She is a retired professor of medical history from the University of Texas and currently lives in Washington, DC.

A word about the International Committee on Crimea taken from their website:
The International Committee for Crimea (ICC) is a group of people interested in raising awareness about the historical, cultural, and socio-political aspects of the Crimean Tatars in their native land as well as in Diaspora. They are descendants of Crimean Tatars living in diaspora, Tatars who have returned to Crimea after almost forty-seven years of forced exile, and friends and allies of Crimean Tatars. Our members live in the U.S.A, Turkey, Germany, Holland, and Ukraine.
The ICC provides a platform where dedicated and active Crimean Tatars and friends of Tatars can meet and share information, ideas, and experiences. Through Crimea-L, an Internet discussion group, and this Web site, the ICC aims to create and maintain a network of Crimean Tatars and friends of Tatars in different parts of the world.
We believe that Crimean Tatars, who were unjustly deported en masse from their homeland by Soviet authorities on 18 May 1944, have the right to live in their homeland in peace, free of social and economic prejudices against them. We look forward to the day when Crimean Tatars are recognized as people with a history and culture who inhabited the Crimean peninsula for centuries.

Gasprinsky Library Departments and what they do: Scientific-Methodology Department

There are six different departments in the Gasprinsky Library—Scientific and Methodology, Bibliography, Archives, Collections, Reading Hall, and Computer/Technology Center. In the next few blogs, I thought I would write a bit about each department, highlighting what they do and the people who work in them. And, of course, it only seems natural that I would start with my department—the Scientific-Methodology Department.
The Scientific-Methodology Department is responsible for a number of functions related to working with the libraries across Crimea to better serve the Crimean Tatar population. In a recent presentation for the library staff, our department listed some of our most important functions:
1. Provide guidance and advice to the libraries of Crimea in the fields of information service for the Crimean Tatar population, including acquisition and promotion of their Crimean Tatar literature collections.
2. Monitor and analysis for the Ministry of Culture of AR Crimea the library and information services for the Crimean Tatar population.
3. Coordinate with other Crimean libraries in the introduction of innovative methods in the development of Crimean Tatar Library structures.
4. Organize trainings for librarians.
5. Prepare and produce teaching aides to assist the Ministry of Culture of AR Crimea
6. Implement relations with international libraries through the use of modern information technology.
7. Organize paid services in the library.

Here are the staff in the Scientific-Methodology Department:
Refika Feticlyamova who is responsible for preparing the plans and reports for the Ministry of Culture of AR Crimea.
Nadjie Yagya is the head methodologist of the library. She is also my counterpart.
Elmas Emirova is responsible for content of the library's website.
And here I am with Refika and Nadjie, welcoming visitors to our department.