Last week two members of staff from Imberhorne, Mr Gascoyne and Ms Nash, accompanied by two student ambassadors, Jason Groves and Fiona Stratford, attended a conference in the Black Sea port of Samsun in northern Turkey as part of a Comenius Project entitled “The World 1,000 years Ago”. Imberhorne is the lead school and co-ordinating the project with three other schools – two from Turkey and one from the Netherlands.

This year the EU funded project is examining the geography and history 1,000 years ago of two areas of Turkey – the Samsun region on the Black Sea coast and Cappadochia in Central Anatolia - the Nijmegen region of The Netherlands and in Sussex. Next year the project will be looking at the arts, culture, language, tradition and religion of the different regions.

The conference mornings involved the students talking about their work and discussing similarities and differences between the four areas. In the afternoons the participants were taken to various places in and around the city – including museums, a very ancient wooden mosque, an extremely old Plane tree, delta and other natural areas which have evolved during the last 1,000 years and the ancient remains of buildings in sheer cliffs.

The abiding memory for all of those who took part was the warmth and kindness of the Turkish people. Indeed their hospitality was almost overwhelming at times. Small fish in Sussex maybe, but in Northern Turkey we were treated like stars. We made very good friends on what seemed a very short visit and whatever else is achieved with this Comenius project the most important aim of such programmes has been fulfilled – that is a better understanding of other peoples’ cultures and countries and the building of friendships between the participants. Teşekkűr ederim.

It is also important to thank all of those students from Imberhorne - and of course Mr Tillett - who have taken part in the project, but were unable to attend the conference – Russell Dunn, Owen Morgan, Matt Tolliday, Chris Lamprell and Ollie Carpenter, who worked with Jason Groves on the history section, Jon Lowe, Chris Hawkins, David Kemp, Imogen Watkins and Claire Hale, who worked with Fiona Stratford on the geography section.


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