The committee that decides what counts as world heritage will meet in İstanbul for 11 days next summer. Türkiye's Foreign Ministry said on 28 July 2026 that UNESCO's World Heritage Committee will hold its 49th session in the city from 27 June to 7 July 2027, under a decision taken by the committee itself at its 48th session in Busan, in the Republic of Korea.
The ministry's statement is brief. It gives the dates and the city, says the Busan session made the call, and adds that Türkiye will keep contributing to international cooperation on protecting cultural and natural heritage. That is the whole of it.
The body arriving in İstanbul is small and it decides a great deal. Created under the 1972 convention on protecting the world's cultural and natural heritage, it is that treaty's decision-making organ: 21 member states, elected for four-year terms, who rule on which places are inscribed on the World Heritage List, review how already-listed sites are being looked after, decide which of them belong on the List of World Heritage in Danger, and direct the spending of the World Heritage Fund.
Those are consequential votes. An inscription reshapes a local economy, as Göbeklitepe's visitor numbers near Şanlıurfa have shown since it was listed in 2018. A place on the danger list is a public finding that something is not being protected. At Busan the committee used an emergency procedure to put six locations on the main list and the danger list at the same time, Sebastia in the occupied West Bank and five castles in southern Lebanon, over objections from Israel, according to Al Jazeera.
Anadolu Ajansı reported that Türkiye's permanent delegate to UNESCO, Ambassador Mustafa Yurdakul, took the chair of the 49th session at the same Busan meeting, and that Türkiye was elected to the committee for the 2023 to 2027 term. The agency put the country's tally on the World Heritage List at 22 cultural and mixed sites. None of those three details appear in the ministry's statement.
Türkiye is not finished adding to the list. Karahantepe, the site near Göbeklitepe, is expected to be put forward in time.
The session opens in İstanbul on 27 June 2027.