Pınar Aykaç is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. She holds an MSc in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage from METU and a PhD from The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her research focuses on the relationship between heritage sites and museums, heritage politics and contestations, and the interpretation and presentation of heritage places. She is the author of Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula: Musealization and Urban Conservation (Lexington Books, 2022) and co-editor of Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement, and Catastrophe (I.B. Tauris, 2021), alongside Eray Çaylı and Sevcan Ercan. Currently, she serves as a co-editor of the journal Heritage & Society.

KORAY DURAK is an associate professor in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. He has been teaching courses on the history of the medieval Mediterranean region, Byzantine history, and Byzantine medicine since 2008. His main areas of research interest include Byzantine-Islamic relations, especially the economic side of it, commercial history of Byzantine Constantinople, and Byzantine pharmacology in addition to his lasting interest in the history of Byzantine studies in modern Turkey. Currently he is working on a project explores the exchange of materia medica between Byzantium and the Islamic world in the early Middle Ages.
Among his publications one can list “Healing Gifts: The Role of Diplomatic Gift Exchange in the Movement of Materia Medica between the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds,” Drugs in the Medieval Mediterranean: Pharmacological Exchange across Cultures, Genres, and Languages (11th-14th c.), (Cambridge University Press, 2023), “Traffic across the Cilician Frontier: Movement of People between Byzantium and the Islamic Near East in the Early Middle Ages,” Byzantium and the Arab World, Encounter of Civilizations, eds. A. Kralides and A. Gkoutzioukostas, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2013, “Commercial Constantinople,” Cambridge Companion to Constantinople, ed. S. Basset, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge in 2022, and a monograph named The Odyssey of Byzantine Studies in Turkey (Koç University Press, 2023).