Serie BG-NBKM/F279A - Ottoman archives, Dimašq [Damascus’ collection] (second series of documents in Ottoman-Turkish)

Global extent: unknown; 5 selected and described archival units

The history of the acquisition of most of the Ottoman documents held in the NLB dates back to the early 1930s when the authorities of the recently proclaimed Republic of Turkey, known for their rejection of the Sultan’s rule and the Ottoman legacy, sold a large amount of Ottoman documents (conveyed through several wagons) to a Bulgarian paper mill in order to be recycled for paper production. When the first wagons arrived, the factory owners noticed that the cargo consisted of Ottoman documents and asked an expert assessment from the Oriental Department. After the historical and archival value of the documents was confirmed, they were transferred to Sofia to be preserved in the Oriental Department.

[Preface of 1984 Sofia’s catalogue, p. 29]
The documents in Arabic were identified among the documents in Ottoman-Turkish in the final processing of the latter. They were picked out and later classified according to the “Directions for classifying Ottoman-Turkish documents” of the Oriental department [...].
In this way, on the basis of language distinction in recent years the documents in Arabic formed an independent collection which exists along with the documents in Ottoman-Turkish.
Apart from the documents forming the Arabic collection, our inventory also includes a few documents in Arabic which have been classified and processed along with the documents in Ottoman-Turkish at the initial organization of the fonds of the Oriental Department (more than 30-40 years ago). These are few documents in the collection OAK (Orientalska Arhivna Kolektsija = Oriental Archives collection= and NPTA (Novopridobiti Turski Arhivi = New acquisitions of Turkish archives) and from some towns’ fonds [...].

The documents in Ottoman-Turkish and Arabic kept in the “Cyril and Methodius” National Library contain valuable material for the study of the social, economic, political and cultural development of the Arab countries from the XVIth to the XXth century.
They also offer a rich material for studies in the field of the Arabic and the Ottoman-Turkish diplomatics and paleography, language research, as well as for special regional and town studies.

The series is closed.

The original system is lost.
In the Oriental Department of the National Library of Bulgaria, Sofia, the organization process of Ottoman documents into archival fonds according to the previously existing Ottoman provinces is an important point. The process was executed within two stages: on the first stage, over 1,000 topographical fonds have been set up and organized into alphabetical order, while at the second stage fonds with similar enumeration with an attached “A” have been added, respectively. These fonds mainly include documents written in Ottoman Turkish, while those in Arabic have been filed into a special collection (distinguished by an “Ar” suffix). Hence fonds 283 and 283A contain documents related to Ottoman Jerusalem (“Kudus”). Since the key word used by the archivists in the distribution of the documents was the place name appearing in them, the founds include both documents sent from Jerusalem to the Ottoman capital Istanbul, as well as drafts of documents sent from Istanbul to the local authorities in Jerusalem. Although most of the documents deal directly with Jerusalem proper, some documents are related to other places located within the province of Jerusalem such as Jaffa, Hebron, Bethlehem, etc. Some documents have been mistakenly distributed to the Jerusalem fonds because of the similarity between the Arabic/Ottoman name of Jerusalem (Kuds/Kudüs), and the expression “Kuddise Sırruh” (“May God bless him”) used for the famous mystic Jalal ad-din Rumi (1207-1273) whose tomb is in Konya, Central Anatolia. The same is true also for some other documents in which the mosques and waqfs of Rumi are mentioned.

Subject to the authorization of National Library of Bulgaria (NBKM) (Sofia)

ISAD(G): Second Edition, Ottawa 2000.

Catalogue prepared on January 2017

Orlin Sabev, “From paper mill to archives: the Jerusalem documents in the National Library of Bulgaria”, published on Open Jerusalem’s blog on July 13, 2017; https://openjlem.hypotheses.org/1643

Inventory of the documents in Arabic language kept in the Oriental department of the Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia, XIII-XX c., compiled by Stojanka Kenderova, edited by Dr. Victor Lebedev, translated into English by L. Zaharieva, Sofia, 1984.

Inventory of 5 items from the series F279A entitled “Dimašq” (1850-1875) of the Ottoman archives held by the National Library of Bulgaria (Sofia), made by Stoyanka Kenderova, 2017.