Çanakkale's first international ceramics symposium

The first International Çanakkale Ceramics Symposium ran from 18 July to 7 August 2026. According to Nouvart, writing on 25 July 2026, fourteen invited artists took part, six of them from Thailand, South Korea, the United States, Hungary and Russia, alongside eight from Turkey. The event was supported by Kaleseramik and organised with ÇASEM, the ceramics research centre at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, and the municipality.

The programme combined making with scholarship: three physical exhibitions, 52 paper presentations, eight workshops and demonstrations of traditional kiln firing, plus 14 international and 38 national online presentations and two online exhibitions. The framing matters locally. In Çanakkale, ceramics means two things at once, a pottery tradition thousands of years old and one of Turkey's largest tile and sanitaryware industries. Setting up a symposium that refuses to treat the material purely as a construction input, while being backed by that same industry, is a deliberate move. The real test is whether a second edition follows.