Nil Baydar is the founding head of the Conservation and Archive Department at the Manuscripts Institution of Türkiye, where she has led the national conservation strategy for Islamic manuscripts since 2012. She established Türkiye’s largest manuscript conservation center, widely known as the “Book Hospital” or Şifahane, which serves 18 manuscript libraries across the country and houses over half a million items, including 250,000 manuscripts and 300,000 rare printed books. She has trained more than 70 conservators and led numerous international conservation and training initiatives in regions such as Egypt, Algeria, Mauritania, Mali, and Pakistan, many in collaboration with institutions such as TİKA (Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency) and TIMA (The Islamic Manuscript Association, UK). Dr. Baydar holds degrees in Restoration and Conservation, Art History, and completed her PhD at Gazi University in 2023 with a dissertation on the codicological features of 15th-century Ottoman manuscripts, with a special focus on bindings. She coordinated a TÜBİTAK-funded national research project on Islamic paper materials and has presented her work at international conferences, including in Copenhagen, Granada, and Almaty. She lectures on paper conservation and Islamic manuscript studies at four universities in Türkiye, covering topics such as codicology, conservation ethics, preventive care, binding structures, and the materiality of manuscripts. Her teaching integrates theory and hands-on conservation techniques, and she frequently supervises both undergraduate and post graduate research. In addition to her institutional leadership, she is actively engaged in academic publishing, exhibition curation, and international manuscript heritage advocacy.

Nikolas Sarrıs is a senior book and paper conservator at the National Library of Greece. He has been an Assistant Professor of book and paper conservation at the Department for the Preservation and Conservation of Cultural Heritage in Zakynthos, Greece and a conservator at the British Library where he took part in the conservation project of the Codex Sinaiticus. He was the supervisor of the conservation laboratory at the monastery of St John Theologian, Patmos, Greece, where he also organized the “Patmos Workshops on Conservation and Historic Bookbinding”, 2006-2012. Dr. Sarris collaborated since 2001 with the Ligatus Research Centre, UK on bookbinding research related to the St Catherine’s Library Conservation Project in Sinai and since 2006 with the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation for conservation and training projects at the National Library of Egypt, Cairo. He worked with Hamburg University on the EU funded project Ethio-SPARE for the preservation and on-site conservation of Ethiopic manuscripts in Tigray, Ethiopia. He has been an UNESCO consultant and ALIPH Foundation project leader for training and manuscript conservation projects for libraries of Iraq and is an Expert Evaluator, Reviewer and Vice Chair for the EU Commission on HORIZON projects. He has lectured, given workshops and published widely on the topics of book conservation and historic bookbinding. He received his PhD from the University of the Arts London, on the decorated bookbindings of the manuscripts from library of the St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt.

Guiseppe Marotta is a PhD candidate in archaeometry at the University of Hamburg. He is member of the Mobile Lab of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’. He obtained his Master’s degree in book, paper and parchment conservation at the Istituto Centrale per la Patologia degli Archivi e del Libro in Rome. “

As a third-generation descendant of a Turkish family that was originally from Thessaloniki on my mother’s side and Cretan on my father’s side, I was incredibly excited by the idea of working with manuscripts at the Hafız Ahmed Agha Library in Rhodes. This opportunity, which would bring together the presence of colleagues with whom I would work, the unique atmosphere of Rhodes, and the work I enjoy most in my life, came along at a time when orange and lemon blossoms were mind-blowing. We spent a wonderful week hosted with great warmth by Tarık Tüten and Aydın Bostancı. I am deeply honored and grateful to have been part of this project, initiated under the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg, in the peaceful setting of the Library. I sincerely hope that our efforts will help ensure the preservation of these precious manuscripts and rare printed books for many generations to come.”

Nil Baydar