News

On October 8, in the Uzeyir Hajibeyli Presentation Zone of the Baku Expo Center, a book donation ceremony was held by publishers to support the "Let's go with a book" book collection campaign, which is a joint project of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the National Library.

The event was opened by the director of the National Library, professor Karim Tahirov, who spoke about the great victory of the Supreme Commander Ilham Aliyev and the Azerbaijan army. He stated that the historical victory won was written in golden letters in the newest history of Azerbaijan. Karim Takhirov noted that the buildings of the 975 libraries that remained in all regions liberated from occupation were completely destroyed and and razed to the ground, and their valuable book collections of more than 4.6 million copies were looted and burned.

During the visits of our Honorable President Mr. Ilham Aliyev to the regions liberated from occupation - Fuzuli and Jabrayil, Gubadli and Zangilan, Agdam showing the houses and buildings completely destroyed by the Armenian invaders, the Ministry of Culture and the National Library joined his call "... we will restore all of them" and started a book collection campaign from January 15, 2021 for the libraries to be restored in our reviving occupied territories.

The director emphasized that the first one who  joined to this project was our respected intellectual, People's writer Elchin. He initially presented about 500 books from his personal library to the library for this purpose. Later, a considerable number of our intellectuals, writers and poets, publishers and citizens of the whole country joined the project. The speaker noted that approximately 12,000 copies of books were collected at the last exhibition, and now there are more than 102,000 copies of literature in this fund.

Akif Marifli, head of the book industry department of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Azerbaijan, PhD in history, said in his speech that the restoration of destroyed libraries and other cultural institutions in Karabakh is one of the main tasks facing the ministry, and invited everyone to join this mission.

Rexhep Hida, director of the Albanian "Fan Noli" publishing house, made a speech and expressed his gratitude for such a wonderful idea and donated books to the campaign.

Elchin Gafarli, representative of TURKSOY organization for Azerbaijan, expressed his support for the project and donated more than 100 books to the campaign. He also offered to continue this project in order to collect a large number of literature from Turkish publishers at the international exhibition to be held in Istanbul in December.

Irs, Vektor, Apostrophe, Chapar, Ideal Print, Alatoran, Mimfa and other republican publishing houses also donated their publications to the Karabakh Foundation.

Finally, Karim Tahirov called all Azerbaijani people, intellectuals, authors, publishers to join this humanitarian action and participate in the campaign.