Six students and two teachers from Elena Doamna Food Industry College carried home far more than souvenirs from their Erasmus+ mobility in Turkey.
Istanbul does not greet you quietly. The city arrives all at once — a rumble of ferries crossing the Bosphorus, the call to prayer echoing off ancient stone, the smell of the Grand Bazaar spilling out into narrow alleyways. For the group of students and teachers from Elena Doamna College in Galați, Romania, stepping onto Turkish soil between March 8 and 14, 2026, was the beginning of something that no classroom could have prepared them for.
The visit was part of ERASMUS+ project 2025-1-RO01-KA121-SCH-000313865, a collaboration with Gurpinar Borsa Mesleki ve Teknik Anadolu Lisesi — a vocational high school on the European side of Istanbul. The programme’s central thread was ecological awareness: understanding how climate change reshapes both the natural world and the built heritage that human civilisations have spent millennia creating.
Learning from the forest, and from history
The week opened with an immersion in the Belgrade Forest on the outskirts of the city — a surprisingly vast green lung that has supplied Istanbul with water since Ottoman times. Walking among its oak and beech trees, participants observed ecosystems firsthand, discussed biodiversity, and began to understand what is at stake when urban expansion nibbles away at natural buffers. It was a deliberately grounding start: before analysing problems at a global scale, it helps to stand in the middle of something worth protecting.
The workshops that followed — structured around the theme of Climate Heritage Protection — challenged students to connect two ideas that might seem unrelated at first: the crisis of a warming planet and the vulnerability of the world’s cultural monuments. A multimedia presentation made the link vivid. Coastal erosion is undermining the foundations of Topkapi Palace. Flash flooding increasingly threatens the covered lanes of the Grand Bazaar. Rising humidity is attacking the Byzantine mosaics inside Hagia Sophia. Temperature fluctuations are stressing the structural joints of the Süleymaniye Mosque. These are not abstract projections — they are measurable, ongoing processes affecting sites listed by UNESCO as part of humanity’s shared inheritance.
The city as classroom
Istanbul’s transport network became an unexpected lesson in sustainability. Students rode trams, took the metro, boarded ferries, and walked pedestrian routes — all while collecting structured data on emissions, efficiency, and accessibility. They calculated carbon footprints for various modes of travel and compared the environmental cost of private cars against well-run public systems. The numbers were striking: a well-electrified transit network can cut carbon emissions by as much as ninety percent compared with private vehicle use. In a city of nearly twenty million people spread across two continents and divided by a major strait, getting transport right is not a lifestyle choice — it is an ecological imperative.
Navigating Istanbul’s hills, waterways, and historic districts gave students a practical appreciation for the complexity of urban mobility — lessons that apply directly back home.
Ancient ingenuity, modern lessons
Perhaps the most thought-provoking stop of the week was the Basilica Cistern, built in 532 AD under the Emperor Justinian. Descending into its cool, vaulted interior — rows of columns rising from dark water, a faint drip somewhere in the distance — the group encountered a feat of urban infrastructure that still functions nearly fifteen centuries later. Byzantine engineers designed a system that harvested rainwater from across the city, filtered it through sand beds, stored eighty thousand cubic metres underground, and delivered it by gravity to palaces and public fountains. No electricity. No pumps. Just careful observation of hydrology and a willingness to invest in long-term solutions.
The visit prompted direct comparisons with modern rainwater harvesting techniques — and, more broadly, with the habit of reaching for technological complexity when simpler, durable solutions might serve just as well. Students left the cistern with a sharper sense of what „innovation” actually means: not always something new, but sometimes the rediscovery of something wise.
Similar themes surfaced in the exploration of Ottoman hammams, which recirculated and reused water long before the term „circular economy” existed, and in the study of traditional residential architecture — thick stone walls, internal courtyards, wind towers — that achieved passive cooling without a single kilowatt of energy.
Committing to change
The week closed with a planting ceremony in the host school’s garden. Each participant wrote a personal sustainability pledge on a biodegradable label and attached it to a seedling. It was a small, deliberate act — a way of turning five days of observation and discussion into something rooted in the ground. The ceremony included symbolic elements reflecting the Europe–Asia axis on which Istanbul sits, a reminder that the challenges explored during the week belong to no single continent.
Before leaving, everyone completed structured questionnaires reflecting on what they had learned, what skills they had developed, and what concrete actions they planned to take back home. Certificates were awarded, acknowledging the specific competencies gained during the mobility.
More than a project
Official objectives are one thing. The Blue Mosque at dusk, Hagia Sophia in morning light, the controlled chaos of the Grand Bazaar, the Galata Tower silhouetted against the Bosphorus — these are another. For the students from Galați, Istanbul delivered both: a rigorous educational programme and the kind of vivid, sensory experiences that lodge themselves permanently in memory. They returned with data, certificates, and competencies. They also returned with an expanded sense of what the world is and what it could become.
Teşekkür ederim, Istanbul.