A Giant Witness: How Does the Ottoman Archive Work?

One of the largest archives in the world stands in Istanbul, yet most of us have never been inside. According to official figures, the Ottoman Archive, now part of the Presidency of State Archives of the Republic of Türkiye, is home to around 95 million documents and 400,000 registers. Imperial decrees, registers, petitions, maps and accounts are among them. For six centuries the Ottoman state put nearly everything into writing, and most of these records have survived to this day.

The register tradition

How did the Ottoman state keep its records?

The register (defter) was at the heart of Ottoman record keeping. Cadastral survey registers (tahrir defterleri) counted the households, fields and sources of tax in a region. In a sense they are photographs of society taken through the eyes of the state. The registers of important affairs (mühimme defterleri) recorded the orders sent from the Imperial Council to the provinces. The records of the kadı courts (kadı sicilleri) preserve sales, marriages and lawsuits, in other words everyday life itself. A large part of the kadı court records is kept in the State Archives today, while the records of the Istanbul courts are preserved in the archive of the Mufti’s Office of Istanbul.¹

Every document has an identity

How are the documents in the Ottoman Archive organised?

Documents in the archive are not kept at random; they follow a certain order. Collections are sometimes named after the person who classified or compiled them (Ali Emiri, Cevdet) and sometimes after the type of document (Hatt-ı Hümayun, the Sultan’s handwritten decrees). Every document has a catalogue record, its identity card. For a historian this record is the document’s passport. Without knowing where a document comes from, not a single line of it can be read with confidence.

The biggest obstacle: reading

Why are Ottoman documents hard to read?

Finding a document is only half the job; the real challenge is reading it. Ottoman Turkish is written in Arabic script, has its own spelling conventions and relies on set formulas. Each type of document has its own opening formula, prayer and signature layout. The number of specialists who can read this script is limited. Deciphering a document can take a day, and transcribing the whole of it can take a week.

A digital door

Can the Ottoman Archive be accessed online?

The good news is that the archive’s catalogue is now online and researchers can examine scans of millions of documents on screen. The bad news is that scanning is not reading. The bottleneck of turning images into text is still there. This is exactly where artificial intelligence touches historiography. Handwriting recognition models have already begun to wear away a small part of this mountain.

The future of testimony

How neutral is an archive?

An archive is a long diary kept by a state, and no diary is entirely neutral. What was put into writing and what was not is also a choice. That is why silences are sources too. The Ottomans left us six centuries on paper. So what are we leaving to tomorrow? The answer to that question deserves a post of its own.

Notes

1. In 2005, 8,934 original registers from courts outside Istanbul were transferred from the National Library to the State Archives. Microfilm and digital copies of the registers are also held at İSAM (the Centre for Islamic Studies). ↩

References

1. Aktaş, N., & Halaçoğlu, Y. (1992). Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi. TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (Vol. 5, pp. 122–126). Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/basbakanlik-osmanli-arsivi
2. Faroqhi, S. (1999). Approaching Ottoman history: An introduction to the sources. Cambridge University Press.
3. Presidency of State Archives of the Republic of Türkiye. (n.d.). Ottoman Archive. https://www.devletarsivleri.gov.tr
4. Uğur, Y. (2010). Şer’iyye sicilleri. TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (Vol. 39, pp. 8–11). Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/seriyye-sicilleri