Ottoman manuscripts go online in new TÜYEK archive

ISTANBUL  

The Turkish Manuscripts Institution (TÜYEK), operating under the Culture and Tourism Ministry, is making 6,388 manuscripts from its “New Manuscripts Collection” available online today after completing their cataloguing and digitization.

Accessible through the institution’s online portal, the collection features significant works that shed light on Ottoman intellectual, cultural and literary history.

Speaking to state-run Anadolu Agency, TÜYEK President Coşkun Yılmaz said the institution’s Manuscripts Portal, which contains around 485,000 works, provides researchers with fast and uninterrupted access to its holdings.

Yılmaz stressed the importance of digitizing manuscripts, noting that digital access allows anyone to consult the works at any time while also preserving their content and visual quality against potential disasters. Digitization also helps reduce physical wear and tear on fragile manuscripts while making otherwise inaccessible works available to scholars, he said.

He added that the institution continues to expand the portal by digitizing newly acquired manuscripts and preparing scholarly catalogues.

According to Yılmaz, TÜYEK has purchased nearly 20,000 manuscripts from private owners as part of its efforts to preserve Türkiye’s written heritage. The first 6,388 manuscripts in the collection have now been fully digitized and catalogued and are being released to the public.

Around 57 percent of the manuscripts are in Arabic, 38 percent in Turkish and 4.5 percent in Persian, while the collection also includes works in Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu and Latin.

Among the oldest dated manuscripts is a copy from the Islamic year 702 of Hashiya ala Sharh al-Waraqat, a commentary on al-Waraqat by Imam al-Juwayni. Other early manuscripts date to the Islamic years 718, 762, 786 and 789, demonstrating that the collection extends beyond the Ottoman classical era to include works from the Anatolian Seljuk and Beylik periods.

The collection also reflects the geographical breadth of the Ottoman world. Of the manuscripts containing copying-location information, records identify 175 different locations, including Istanbul, Kayseri, Bursa, Edirne, Adana, Damascus, Mecca, Cairo, Tripoli, Crimea and Lesbos. Some manuscripts even specify the madrasas where they were copied.

More than 10 author-autograph manuscripts are included in the collection, alongside over 30 manuscripts containing ijazah (scholarly certification) documents.