According to the news source of the tourism sector in Turkey, Turizm Haber Merkezi, the historical library building in London, the capital of England, which was built in the early 1900s but has been idle for the last 20 years, was restored by a group of Turkish business people living in the city after being rented from the municipality for 200 years and turned into a boutique hotel that includes a library and a culinary arts school.
The rooms of Limehouse Library Hotel, which was restored in 10 years by spending millions of pounds and started to host its guests last year, bear the names of 75 immortal Turkish and foreign personalities in the fields of literature, culture-art, science, philosophy and politics.
From the great leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to Mahatma Gandhi, the political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian Independence Movement; from the English writers Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, who created unique classics, to the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes, the Russian writer Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and the prominent figures of Turkish literature Nazım Hikmet, Yaşar Kemal and Zülfü Livaneli, From the Islamic philosophers Mevlana and Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli to Yunus Emre and Pir Sultan Abdal, the most important representatives of folk literature, the ancient Greek philosopher Soctares, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galileo Galilei, the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, the philosopher and poet Ömer Khayyam are among the names whose memories are kept alive in the hotel.
In rooms with interior architectural applications, furniture and objects depicting the people and the traces they left on the world, guests are informed with books and multimedia applications and are taken on a journey through time. In the hotel where examples of the rich cultural treasures of Anatolia and Mesopotamia are depicted in reliefs and paintings, guests from different countries of the world are introduced to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Epic of Shahmaran, Hacivat and Karagöz and Nasrettin Hodja with objects and visual elements prepared in separate rooms.
Stating that they rented the 120-year-old historical library, which had been idle since 2003, from the municipality for 200 years and opened it as a 75-room boutique hotel last year after a 10-year restoration process, Önder Şahan, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Limehouse Library Hotel, said that they thought and made preparations for a long time to ensure that the building was a project in line with its mission while resurrecting the historical library as a hotel.
