The statement “The Turkic world is our family. We have no other family” put forward by the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, in fact, is an important call that directs the values uniting the Turkic world toward strategic goals. This call necessitates the expansion of cooperation in all fields, including scientific collaboration.

According to AZERTAC, these words were said by Hikmat Guliyev, Director of the Institute of Folklore of ANAS, during his speech at the international scientific conference titled “Our Family is the Turkic World”.

The scholar mentioned that the Turkological Congress, whose 100^th anniversary is being marked this year, was an important stage in bringing together Turkological thought in a systematic way. However, the repressive policies and ideological pressures implemented during the Soviet period created serious obstacles to the broad development of Turkology, limiting the field mainly to linguistic studies.

The director noted that, in the modern period, the model of cooperation formed within the framework of the Organization of Turkic States opened up wide opportunities for the development of Turkological research on new foundations. In this context, Turkological folklore studies necessitate the investigation of the folklore of Turkic peoples on a new theoretical and methodological basis. This, in turn, creates new perspectives for the joint study of the epics of Turkic peoples and, in general, the resources of collective cultural memory, as well as for conducting collaborative field researches.