50th Annual Meeting of the PIAC
The 50th Annual Meeting of the PIAC was held in Kazan, July 1–6, 2007. at the Tatar State University of Humanities and Education (Татарский государственный гуманитарно-педагогический университет [ТГГПУ]). By number of participants, it was definitely one of the bigger meetings in the history of the PIAC, and by PIAC standards could be called a “big congress”. Beyond its scholarly ambitions, the meeting can also duly be called a state affair of Tatarstan as the organization was headed by the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Tatarstan, together with the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan, the Institutes of Oriental Studies and Linguistics of the RAS, and finally the Tatar State University of Humanities and Education (TSUHE, or ТГГПУ in Russian). With appropriate decorum, the hosts welcomed the international participants with outstanding hospitality.
The book of abstracts lists 162 contributions by approx. 170 authors, and it is safe to assume that the actual number of participants was in the same range. The programme lists approximately as many participants. A formal volume of proceedings was never published but some of the contributions in the book of abstracts are everything but abstracts, they are full-fledged academic papers.
Due to the overwhelming number of contributions the meeting had to be split into a total of 11 sections.
The 50th Meeting was the first Meeting which the long-standing Secretary General, Denis Sinor, could not attend in person, but he sent a video greeting from his home in Bloomington, Indiana.
The Indiana University Prize for Altaic Studies (colloquially known as PIAC Medal) was awarded to the historian Mirkasym Usmanov (Миркасы́м Абдулаха́тович Усма́нов (тат. Миркасыйм Габделәхәт улы Госманов) of Tatarstan. At the Business Meeting, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele was elected as Secretary General, succeeding Denis Sinor.
Sightseeing activities included the Kremlin of Kazan and the ancient site of Volga Bulgaria, which required a two-hour ride on the Volga river by hydrofoil.