Turkey

From the ninth century A.D. Turkic peoples from the Central Asian steppes started their odyssey to the West by making their way into Anatolia and Mesopotamia. With the eleventh century the Seljuk Turks had established a strong Turkish entity in these new lands. From the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the thirteenth century to their triumph in the capture of the Byzantine imperial capital of Constantinople in 1453, fascination with the Ottoman world grew and with it, a desire for information about it. The downfall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the modern secular Republic of Turkey in 1923 changed the nature of the state, its society, its culture, and its literature in fundamental ways.

Though Turkish-language materials were not part of the focus of the Near East Section in 1945, a specialist was named in 1959 to guide the growth and see to the maintenance of that collection. The demonstrably satisfying result is that the collection of Turcica at the Library of Congress is now the largest such collection in the United States. The core of the collection resides in the vernacular materials in the various Turkic languages, dialects, and scripts held by the Near East Section.

At present, it has custody of over 50,000 volumes of monographs and serials. Several thousand microfiche and rolls of microfilm and other vernacular collections in the section plus major possessions relating to the Turkic world in other divisions of the Library of Congress add to the richness of its holdings.

One of the most enduringly successful Arabic geographies of the Islamic Middle Ages is the Ajaib al-Makhluqat (The wonders of creation) by the Persian author Zakariya Qazwini (d. 1283 or 1284). Two of the many copies known to exist are reproduced here. The first, from a manuscript copied in Turkey circa 1553, depicts a map, oriented to the south, with an angel holding a bowl of water that contains a fish on whose back is the globe-bearing ox. The second, a testament to the work's continuing popularity, portrays the mythical bird, the Anka (Phoenix), in a Chagatai Turkish edition lithographed in the Central Asian city of Tashkent in 1917. (Near East Section)

Because of this relatively late systematic development of the section's Turkish language materials, the Near East Section's custodial collection of Turcica risked holding a preponderance of contemporary items. For example, the section boasts a complete set of Turkish Republic statistics (1923-present). This danger of fostering a contemporary collection alone has been counteracted by purposeful and assiduous efforts to acquire important books and serials dating from earlier eras.

By the end of the twentieth century, the Library had acquired approximately one hundred Turkish manuscripts, most of which serve researchers of religion. Among these is the section's earliest Turkish manuscript, Muhammed Haravi's Tezkiretul-Evliya (History of the saints) (1526), one of only three copies known to exist. Yazcioglu Mehmed's Muhammediyye (1583) and Zakariya Qazwini's Ajaib al-Makhluqat (The wonders of creation) also from the sixteenth century, are other notable examples.

The earliest of published works in the collection is Vankulu Lugati (Vankulu's dictionary), printed in Istanbul in 1729. Other early publications include a number of the important and rare books printed by Ibrahim Muteferikka during the 1730s as well as works from the press of the Imperial Engineering School. The Engineering School Press books are fine exemplars of the printer's art. Its Nizam-i Cedid (The new order) (1798-1807) was the first attempt to promote reorganization and reform of the Ottoman government and state using European models. Beautifully hand-colored editions of Katib Celebi's Cihannuma (Universal geography) (Istanbul, 1732) and his history of Ottoman naval campaigns are in the collections, as is the Tarih-i Hind-i garbi (History of the discovery of America) (Istanbul, 1732), which is not only the first book about the Americas but also the first illustrated book printed by an Islamic people. Moreover, many of the section's seventy-one exquisite Islamic book bindings, are of Persian and Turkish detailing. The section has acquired many works in Turkish published by the Bulaq Press during the nineteenth century in Egypt. Among these are the Divan-i Izzet Molla (Collection of Izzet Molla's poetry) and the Hamse-yi Nergisi (The Five works of Nergisi), both published in Cairo in 1840. They were printed using the beautiful Nastaliq (cursive script) typefont developed especially for literary works by that press.

Of inestimable value is the Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842-1918) Collection, presented to the Library of Congress by that Ottoman monarch. The collection consists of 402 volumes in Turkish and Arabic representing a wide spectrum of important topics. All are available to the researcher on microfilm, and some of the fragile volumes are preserved in the Near East Section's rare materials collection.

Among the more recent publications held by the section are complete runs of most of the academic serials and series published by Turkish universities and scholarly societies, such as the Turkish Historical Society's Belletin. The section further holds complete or nearly complete runs of serials published by the Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union since 1955. Included among these are all the journals of the various writers' unions. The Turkish serial collection consists of approximately four hundred Ottoman and republican titles, such as Servet-i Funun (Istanbul, 1895-1901), Turk Kulturu (Ankara, 1963-present), and Turk Dili (Ankara, 1935-present). Major modern newspaper titles include Aksam (Istanbul, 1942-64), Baris (Ankara, 1971-present), Cumhuriyet (Istanbul, 1924-present), and Milliyet (Istanbul, 1962-65, 1970-present).

[Left] Belletin (1937-present) was the first scholarly journal concerned with history, archaeology, and ancillary disciplines published using the roman alphabet new to the Turkish Republic. It remains the leading scholarly serial in Turkey and is the preferred venue there for articles by scholars worldwide. (Near East Section) [Right] A nineteenth-century engraving of a railroad line in the Ottoman Turkish capital of Istanbul graces the cover of the January 1995 issue of Tarih ve Toplum (1983-present), a fine example of the popular press in modern day Turkey. (Near East Section)

Beyond the custodial vernacular collection of the Near East Section, the Library of Congress houses in its General Collections and in its other divisional collections large holdings of Turcica materials in many formats. Of particular note are the Sultan Abdul-Hamid II photograph albums in the Prints and Photographs Division. This intriguing collection is further strengthened and supported by that division's ancillary holdings, such as photographs of the Levantine Near East and the Ottoman Empire.

The Rare Book and Special Collections Division houses significant holdings of pre-nineteenth-century travelogues written by European visitors to the Ottoman Empire, and the General Collections contain even more of this genre from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It should be noted also that virtually every scholarly work written in a European language about the Turks in Turkey or the Turkic peoples of Central Asia is held by the Library in its General Collections.

The acquisition of Turkish-language materials in the Near East Section has been significantly strengthened in the recent past by the establishment of the Turkish Retrospective Fund, which has contributed to the growth in size and prestige of the custodial collection.

The value of the section's Turcica collection has been proved by the scholarship produced based upon it. Researchers of Ottoman literature and history, of Turkish popular culture, of Islam in Turkey, or of the growth of secularism and the republic, as well as those interested in the contemporary Turkish scene, have at their disposal a vast variety of resources at the Library of Congress.