Turkey–EU Joint Parliamentary Committee · TBMM

The story

At the Turkish Grand National Assembly I ran the site of the Turkey–EU Joint Parliamentary Committee (Karma Parlamento Komisyonu) — the body where Turkish MPs and Members of the European Parliament met across one table. Four languages, and an archive of thirty-three Word documents and a PDF: joint declarations, press releases and meeting programmes from the years when the accession talks actually began.

It politely informs you it is “best viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer.” It meant it.

The era

October 2005: accession negotiations between Türkiye and the EU formally open — the diplomatic high-water mark of the whole relationship. The paperwork of that moment passed through pages like these, built in FrontPage 3.0 and encoded in iso-8859-9, on a parliament web server that still spoke pure 1990s.

What was restored

Nothing — this was the cleanest recovery in the museum. No injected code, no broken references, no missing files. The only touches were the museum-wide UTF-8 transcoding and re-fetching one PDF the archive served truncated on the first try. Details in the restoration lab.

Sources

• Wayback Machine capture, 27 December 2006 — the recovery anchor
• Repository — every intervention documented commit by commit