Hrant Dink Foundation
About the organisation
Launched to uncover the multilayered history of cities like Istanbul and Ankara, the project “KarDes: Multicultural Memory Tours Guide” is a bilingual mobile application designed as a personal travel guide. The primary objective is to make marginalized historical narratives visible and promote minority rights. With KarDes, users can discover the cultural inventory of sites such as churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, hospitals, and cemeteries. The app features over 2,000 digitally mapped cultural heritage sites and numerous guided memory tours. It has provided users with rich oral history videos and immersive routes. In the last 3 years, KarDes was updated to add tours and cultural sites from Izmir and Diyarbakır.
KarDes mitigates overtourism by redirecting foot traffic from heavily congested tourist hubs to lesser-known historic neighborhoods. Additionally, its virtual tour capabilities provide a zero-emission alternative for exploring heritage sites.
The project actively fosters inclusivity and social cohesion by preserving the material and intangible heritage of minority groups. Aiming to make visible the urban and social memory which has been on the verge of extinction, the project offers an opportunity to listen to the stories of neighborhood and their changes through oral history interviews with people who have lived or are currently living in those neighborhoods, strengthening community belonging.
KarDes represents a comprehensive digital transformation of heritage management. We adopted mobile geolocation, digital storytelling, and mapping techniques to structure complex historical and demographic data into an interactive, universally accessible app, significantly transforming how the public engages with our shared past.
Activities
Education and capacity building (workshops, trainings, educational programmes)
Awareness raising and community empowerment
Heritage tourism (guiding, touring)
Research
Documentation and archiving
Digitisation
Advocacy and policy