Türkiye–EU Relations · Undersecretariat of Foreign Trade

The story

My first professional site. As webmaster at the Undersecretariat of Foreign Trade (Dış Ticaret Müsteşarlığı) I built and ran the EU affairs section: the legal texts of Türkiye–EU relations, the customs union, free trade agreements, trade statistics — some 130 pages of it, hand-assembled in FrontPage on a government desk in Ankara.

And one thing the official brief did not include: on the map of Europe, over a certain spot on the Bosphorus called Üsküdar, I hid a secret link to my personal homepage. The archive's capture dates from just after I left — a successor had already replaced the webmaster line — so this restoration puts a few things back the way I had them, easter egg included.

The era

2001: Türkiye has just been declared an EU candidate at Helsinki (1999), the customs union is five years old, and “e-government” is a word ministries are still learning to pronounce. Official sites are built in-house by whoever knows HTML, tables inside tables, encoded in windows-1254 because Turkish and the web haven't fully made peace yet.

What was restored

Six shared template graphics the archive never captured under /AB/ were recovered from identical copies in sibling sections of the same server; one filename was made ASCII-safe; an IE4-era FrontPage animation was wrapped so modern browsers stay quiet. The author's own restorations — original webmaster contact, gray background, full-width layout, the Üsküdar easter egg — are documented one commit each in the restoration lab. One page (euro1.htm) is lost forever: the archive never took a copy.

Sources

• Wayback Machine capture, 12 February 2002 — the recovery anchor
• Repository — every intervention documented commit by commit