Education

01NESİN MATHEMATICS VILLAGE

Set on a mountaintop 1 km from the village of Şirince (İzmir – Selçuk), in complete seclusion amid lush greenery, this is a village where everyone from 7 to 70 does, learns, teaches and thinks about mathematics at every level. Owned by the Nesin Foundation, it covers a total of 55 decares (about 13.6 acres), 30 of them olive groves.

In short, the Nesin Mathematics Village is a village founded for the love of mathematics. It was conceived by Ali Nesin, one of Türkiye’s leading mathematicians, under the umbrella of the Nesin Foundation, established by his father Aziz Nesin, one of Türkiye’s most important writers. Built as a community effort with the support of donors, the village hosts summer and semester-break camps. All kinds of mathematical activity, from primary-school level teaching to the most advanced research, can take place here at the same time. It can currently accommodate 500 people.

Alongside the Mathematics Village, which is unique in the country, a Philosophy School and a Theater Madrasa also run their programs at certain times of the year. You can also visit the Mathematics Village as a tourist, but you should keep quiet and avoid disturbing the concentration of the young people there. Before you go, you can check the official website for the dates of its programs.

If a Mathematics Village on a mountaintop doesn’t surprise you, we’re sure its library, with its wonderful architecture, will. Every single person who visits the Mathematics Village has a photo in front of the big abacus in the square! Follow the tradition yourself.
https://nesinkoyleri.org/

02DEU – Efes Vocational School

The EFES VOCATIONAL SCHOOL of Dokuz Eylül University is located in the Selçuk district of İzmir. It was established in 2013 at the initiative and request of the Selçuk Association for the Development of Higher Education, the Selçuk Chamber of Commerce, the Selçuk City Council and 10 different NGOs in Selçuk. With financial support from the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality and the Selçuk District Municipality, its modern building on a dedicated campus was completed in 2015, and it began teaching in the 2016–2017 academic year.

The school offers programs in Tourism and Hotel Management, Cultural Heritage and Tourism, Food Technology, Civil Aviation Management, and Civil Aviation Cabin Services. One of the main reasons for founding the school in this region is to raise awareness, in the light of science, of the cultural heritage in İzmir’s Selçuk district that people around the world regard as sacred, and so to create alternative forms of tourism for the country, such as faith tourism. With this in mind, the school has begun training qualified tourism and hotel staff with a curriculum that highlights the major cultural heritage assets of Selçuk, a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the Ancient City of Ephesus, the House of the Virgin Mary, the Temple of Artemis, the Seven Sleepers, early Christian churches, the İsa Bey Mosque of the Aydınoğulları period, Çukuriçi Mound and Ayasuluk Castle. Its graduates will thus be equipped to offer the best possible service to visitors who come for faith tourism to a region that holds works of both paganism and the three Abrahamic religions, spanning some 8,500 years of history. Looking ahead, the school also aims, through the hands-on education that this geographical advantage makes possible, and as Selçuk builds its brand under the name of Ephesus, to grow into a long-term institution of higher education and scientific research within a “Faculty of Cultural Heritage”, perhaps the first in Türkiye, with departments of Faith Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Restoration and Conservation.

https://efesmyo.deu.edu.tr/