What would you do if you were asked to sculpture the Mediterranean? How can you turn a sea with its waves, wind, seaweed, fish and phosphorescence into a statue?

“While thinking about people in love and embracing each other, the Mediterranean came into my mind. The Mediterranean Sea is big and it is close to us. I wished to represent its name with opened arms. I wished to employ the greatness that is woman to tell of this love and embracing,” said İlhan Koman, the artist who won the 1981 Sedat Semavi Foundation Visual Arts Prize for this sculpture.

Zülfü Livaneli, Sabah newspaper, August 2000

The Mediterranean statue has been a symbol of our company since Yapı Kredi Insurance (then Halk Insurance) commissioned it. The statue stands in front of the company’s previous headquarters, built in Zicirliküyü, Istanbul, in 1980. It is the figure of a woman made up of 112, 12mm-thick metal plates and weighs 4 tons.