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Dear Colleagues,

Nature decided I could not make it to Cordoba! How to express my disappointment?

I am not only missing a MELCom meeting I was particularly keen to participate in, I am also

missing you all I so much wanted to see again. Besides, I was also planning to discover this city

and this area that has been so dear to my ancestors' memory.

My heart is with Nuria who spent so much time and energy to prepare this wonderful event. My

mind is with you. Make the best of the conference!

Sara

(Slide 1- while presenting the speakers) Millet Yazma Eserler Kütüphanesi _ MELCom International, Cordoba, 20 April 2010

(Slide 2 – to present the outline of the talk)

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Slide 3 : 1. The administrative organisation and the premises of the Library

Millet Yazma Eserler Kütüphanesi, or Millet Manuscript Library is a specialised research library

that depends on public fund and functions under the auspices of the Turkish ministry of Culture and

Tourism, Directorate general of libraries and publications.

(Slide 4 :)Apart from its director, the personnel includes two professional librarians, three technicians, three clerks, 10 security guards and four people in charge of the maintenance (cleaning,

cooking, repairing, etc.)

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(Slide 5 :) The premises include a main building, the old medrese building and an annex.

(Slide 6 :) The main building itself is made of two symmetrical halls accessible on the right and left of the

entrance stairs. On the left is the small museum where rare documents and belongings of the

founder, Ali Emiri Efendi, are displayed. On the right is the reading room, open to public seven

days a week. It has a dozen Intranet connected reading desks and a capacity to accommodate 15 to

20 more readers on simple desks

The offices and a number of stacks that host over 30 000 volumes occupy the 10 study rooms of the

old medrese, located across the main building. This L shaped construction includes a conference

hall with 80 seats.

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Behind the complex, in a separate small building are storage rooms, rest rooms and a small dining

room for the staff.

The whole area adds up to 1650 m². Its garden with a kiosk, a well and a fountain has a couple of

benches, a few tables and chairs where one can take pleasant breaks.

(Slides 7 and 8 :) 2. The history of the building

This small compound of buildings is situated in the heart of Fatih, the oldest Turkish neighborhood

of Istanbul. Millet Kütüphanesi is right across the Fatih mosque (the mosque built by Mehmed the

Conqueror). According to its kitâbe (inscription), the place was built as Darü’l-Hadis in 1112 i.e. in

1700/1701 of the Christian era by an Ottoman şeyhülislam Seyyid Feyzullah Efendi (whom we

shall refer to later). It is named after him as Feyziyye Medresesi. The architect is not (yet) known.

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According to historians of art, the construction has classical Ottoman features but they also point at

some signs of western influence mainly visible on the façade fountain.

Unfortunately, as is with a number of historical buildings, Feyziyye Medresesi was neglected

throughout the years. Having undergone an earthquake and a fire successively at the end of the 19th

C., the place was to be razed to the ground by the local authorities which had planned to replace the

by a park. Thanks to the initiative of the Association of Istanbul lovers and the şeyhülislam of that

period (early 20th C), the site was saved from being demolished and was instead restored in 1916

when Ali Emiri Efendi moved in his collections and decided to turn it into a public library. It has

served as such since then, under different administrative structures. It hosted various vakfiye or

endowment collections which moved out since, mostly to Süleymaniye Library.

In 1999, the Marmara earthquake that damaged severly Adapazarı and its environments, including

Istanbul, had its repercussions on the Millet Kütüphanesi building as well. The complex was

restored again with much attention from the city authorities in charge of cultural heritage sites. The

building was renovated according to its original late period classical Ottoman architecture. During

the restoration works, the collections were sent to Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi where they were

kept for three years. In 2002 Millet Kütüphanesi finally found its initial identity, fully equipped to

serve as a modern library.

(Slide 9 :) 3. The founders of the collections 3.1. Seyyid Feyzullah Efendi Feyzullah Efendi was born in 1639 in Erzurum. As a young man, he learned Arabic and Persian, as

well as fiqh, had the privilege of being the famous scientist Mehmed Vânî's student who later

brought him to the Sultan's court in Edirne. Seyyid Feyzullah Efendi served twice as şeyhülislam

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(once for only 17 days in 1688 and later for eight consecutive years in 1695) but previously taught

in prestigious institutions. He was even the private teacher of Sultan Mustafa II (1669) and later of

Sultan Ahmet III (1678) but unfortunately, he was cruelly murdered after a revolt in 1703, referred

to as the “Edirne event” or the “Feyzullah Event”.

In his lifetime, Feyzullah Efendi built a number of schools, libraries, baths, mosques, fountains in

various important cities like Erzurum, Mecca, Madina, Damascus and of course in Fatih, Istanbul.

He also wrote a few books in Arabic and in Turkish, translated from Arabic to Turkish.

Over 2000 manuscripts that are still kept at Millet Kutuphanesi are from the original Darü’l-Hadis

or Feyziyye Medresesi collections. They are almost all in Arabic. Five of them were recently

loaned to the Abu Dhabi exhibition (Melek should give its exact name and date)

(Slide 10 :) 3.2. Ali Emiri Efendi Ali Emiri was a selective book connaisseur at his time. His fame reached France even during his

lifetime through articles published in la Revue des deux mondes and Journal asiatique which

mentioned the collectionneur as well as his book collection. The only picture we have of him is a

post humous portrait painting, for, we are told, Ali Emiri refused to be photographed.

Ali Emiri was born in 1857 in Diyarbakir to a well known family of merchants, the Emîrzades. He

studied Farsi with his uncle, learned Kurdish during his stay in Siirt and developed a passion for

Arabic when he was in Mardin. Ali Emiri served for 31 years as a civil servant. His cultural

background and knowledge of traditional literature was much appreciated by Muslim clerks who at

the time were “threatened” by western values. During his professional life, Ali Emiri travelled

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extensively within the Empire. He was appointed to various positions in fifteen different Ottoman

provinces, from Rumeli in the west to Arabia in the south, where he collected books or simply

copied them when he could not purchase them.

When in 1908 at the age of 51 he retired from civil service, he was offered a number of places he

could choose among, in order to host his rich and precious collection of books. His first choice

was Şehid Ali library in Aya Sofia but the building required long term restoration and those were

difficult war days where money and manpower was scarce. Finally he accepted the offer of

Feyziyye Medresesi which was about to be razed to the ground as we said previously but saved

from demolition thanks to “activists” among whom was also the French Ambassador's wife.

Ali Emiri brought along all of his books that amounted to some 16000 volumes ; however he

turned down the suggestion that this library be referred to as “Ali Emiri Efendi Kütüphanesi”.

Though a conservative for his time, he was nevertheless very progressive in defending the idea of a

peoples' library. He thus baptised (if I may) the library as Millet Kütüphanesi, people’s library.

Millet Kütüphanesi was founded precisely on the 17th of April 1916, ninty-four years ago. Ali

Emiri acted as its first director from that day until his death in January 1924. He rests in the

courtyard of Fatih Mosque, not far from his books.

He left behind a number of works (some thirty according to his biographer) among which is Tezkire-

i şuara-yı Âmid, the biographies of famous people from his native city, but also his own poetry.

Muhtar Tevfikoğlu's book Ali Emiri Efendi published in Ankara in 1989 give extensive information

about him. Babinger , EI2 and TDV Islam Ansiklopedisi also have entries on Ali Emiri.

(Slide 11 :)

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3.2. The contents of the collections Two periodicals published by Ali Emiri himself, namely Osmanlı Tarih ve Edebiyat mecmuası and

Tarih ve Edebiyat reveal details on the establishment of the library, both on the choice of the

location and on the nature of the endowment. The preparation of the catalogue and registers have

been, it seems, matter of public discussions and debate. Our colleague Tuba Çavdar of Marmara

University (she attended a MELCom Intl conference in Liège) has devoted a whole article to this

question in the exhibition catalogue of the collection prepared by Pera Museum in 2007. By the

way, this book is presently being prepared for a second edition.

The collection's main distinguishing feature is that most of the books are unique or very rare copies,

mostly relevant to Ottoman-Muslim culture. It includes sultans' divans, unique miniature books,

writings on language and literature, history, geography, medical sciences, arts... Librarians in the

past divided it into the following subject matters (as shown on the slide 11, no need to read them out

loud)

(Slide 12 : a map of Spain, undated but probably from famous Ücaletü'l cografiyye)

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(Slide 13 :) The collection has also some remarkable official documents such as firmans and berats as well as

some very beautiful hatt that is calligraphy pieces.

(Slide 14 :) But most important among all the books and documents is the world wide unique original copy of

Dîvan-û Lûgatü't-Türk by Kaşgarlı (or Kaşgarî) Mahmud, a work considered to be a milestone, in

fact the first study, on Turkish language. It was written in H. 464/ 1071 but completed only two

years later, after various stages of corrections, with the aim of teaching Turkic languages to the

Arabs. The original book mentioned in Katib Çelebi's Keşfü’z-zünûn is no longer available. This

unique copy (AE Arabî 4189) which dates from the 14th century is, according to its scribe, copied

from the original. It has served for all the éditions critiques and translations that have been

published since.

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(Slide 15 : a piece by Ali Emiri's hand, poetry book) In 1924 after Ali Emiri's death, several collections hosted in various small endowment libraries

were transferred to Millet Kütüphanesi. However, in 1962 the library changed its status and became

a general public library (halk kütüphanesi). The endowment collections left thus for Süleymaniye.

Some twenty years later, in 1981, the public library collections moved to another site in Istanbul.

Millet Kütüphanesi served as a smaller local public library for a while. During the move to Beyazıt

Devlet Library more recently, the “new” i.e. post-1928 printed books in Latin script were

dispatched as gifts to Sakarya University Library.

In other words, although the collections hold Ali Emiri's name, some of these books, were probably

not from his personal library but were added afterwards by various donators. Likewise, although

very few, we are still locating some of Ali Emiri's manuscripts. Only a few weeks ago, the well

known hatt specialist Uğur Derman brought in the third volume of Cevahir-i mülûk (Sultans'

biographies), by Ali Emiri's hand -- the two first volumes of which have been printed in 1914. In

fact, Professor Derman had literally bumped upon the book in Boston ten years ago and had meant

to give it to Millet Kütüphanesi on behalf of its holder, professor of Arabic at Tufts University, Dr.

Mohammed Alwan. But this was 1999, and as mentioned above, the earthquake had damaged the

library which had to leave its premises and was in no state to receive gifts.

Today the library is classified as a specialised research institution under the name of Millet Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi and receives public funding from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. It does not have acquisitions budget though. All together the collection adds up to some 30 000 books of

which 7000 are manuscript volumes in Arabic (around 5000), Turkish (over 2600) and Persian

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(close to 600).

(Slide 16 :) 4. Services and activities Unlike the official announcement on the website which says that the library is open only five days a

week and barely 8 hours a day, the reading room is open seven days a week, every day of the year,

including holidays. Readers may come from 8 in the morning and stay until 8 in the evening. They

may use the Intranet catalogue which posts the records and the digital copies of the books for an

important part of the collection.

The only requirement to enjoy from the library collection is to show one's ID to the security guard

at the entrance and to register.

Upon payment, patrons may obtain the digital copies of books they may even get right then and

there on the spot.

As for the library’s activities, apart from exhibitions either in the small museum hall or jointly with

other institutions, the library organises weekly talks by specialists either on books and collections or

on the historical issues related to Istanbul. The aim is to bring young generation and local attendees

in contact with specialists.

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(Slide 17 :) 5. Ongoing projects: 5.1. Digitisation of manuscripts and printed material The intensive digitisation of the collections began in the newly restored premises, in 2002, when the

collections came back from Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi. Thanks to Süleymaniye Library, who

initiated this process a year earlier, but mostly thanks to Suna & İnan KIRAÇ foundation which

supported and still supports the operations, backed up by the Ministry of Culture of Tourism.

Today, the catalogue of Millet Kütüphanesi is proud of displaying on screen all the manuscript

records. Three technical staff members are presently busy on a full time basis and pursue the

digitisation of printed books and journals in Arabic script published before 1929. This operation is

expected to be accomplished by 2011.

Bibliographic records may be reached through the manuscript union catalogue “yazmalar.gov.tr”.

However, the digitised documents are linked to the catalogue record may be screened only locally.

The integrated programme of digitisation allows to tag all the pages of the book, beginning with the

covers and the table of contents when this exists. The digitisation is done in TIFF and JPEG

formats, transferred to PDF on DVDs so that readers may use them easily.

5.2. Ali Emiri manuscript recataloging of Turkish and Persian manuscripts The Suna & İnan KIRAÇ foundation has also been very supportive of this project.

Having realised the mistakes and the missing information on the catalogue cards of the manuscripts

while preparing the Pera Museum exhibition of 2007, the Turkish foundation applied for and

received funds from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles with the aim of recataloguing the Turkish

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and Persian manuscripts of the collection. This project began in 2008 and is expected to end in two

years' time, before 2011. The scientific coordinator of the project is Professor Gunay Kut whom

most of you know from her catalogues and “her” team includes various certified scholars like our

colleagues here Professor Cihan Okuyucu and Sadık Yazar ; also among the team are, Zehra Toska,

professor of Turkish literature and much involved in bibliographic work on women's publications,

Hüseyin Türkmen, an esteemed colleague in charge of rare books and manuscripts at Atatürk

Kitaplığı of Istanbul (who presented a paper in MELCom Istanbul, in 2006), to mention some

names you might know.

Among the few who work on the Persian manuscripts, we may quote the names of Professors

Aftandil Erkinov of Tashkent and that of Lale Uluç of Boğaziçi University.

The team also includes some Ph. D. students mostly in history or literature departments. To our

surprise, there are no library or information sciences students involved in this project.

It is of no surprise to those of you who catalogue manuscripts that this campaign allows the

discovery of a number of manuscripts that were not identified in the initial inventory. Some

volumes reveal up to 15 “unknown” works.

When Turkish and Persian manuscripts are done with, Millet Kütüphanesi hopes to find extra

funding for recataloguing Arabic manuscripts which are a very important portion of the whole

collection.

(Slide 18 :) 5.3. Ali Emiri foreign printed books collection (mainly French)

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During my stay in the Millet Kütüphanesi, I was lucky enough to “work” on the collection of

« foreign language books » which are late 19th and early 20th century printed books, mostly in

French, with some titles in German and less so in English. (For the anecdote, we even fell upon

seven road maps printed in Madrid-cf slide 18!). All together, there seem to be some 2000 volumes

registered as “ecnebi lisan” and later “yabanci dil”, that is in western languages. According to a

veteran clerk of the library, there are many more such volumes not yet registered!

(Slides 19 and 20 :) Although having AE ie Ali Emiri series call numbers, I had doubts about their having belonged to

Ali Emiri himself. He was certainly a well learned man, but mainly in traditional disciplines ; he

did master many languages, but they belonged to the Muslim-Ottoman cultural sphere. Yet I had no

evidence the book did not belong to him.

In fact Ali Emiri himself relates in his writings that the larger collection, which also included some

printed books in Turkish, had been Ahmet Zülküf Paşa's donation to the library. And this person

happens to be the son İsmail Hakkı Paşa and Saliha Sultan, who herself was the daughter of

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Abdülaziz. In other words, the donator was the grandson of the 32nd Ottoman Sultan.

Besides “cleaning up” any typing errors, checking the spelling, correcting the records, etc., my

personal purpose for examining this collection in French was to find out if it included any books

that were not in the BnF catalogue. Alas, I was disappointed : Mostly works on classical literature,

on French grammar and on general knowledge, printed over and over again in France, the titles

proved to be all present in the French national library's holdings. However, the lot contains books

in French, published in the Ottoman Empire geography, mainly in Constantinople. Some few

exceptions aside, these editions are rather rare copies, and for this very reason are worth our

attention. Content wise, they are not particularly “precious” : in fact most are textbooks for local

high schools or books on Turkish language for foreigners. Towards the beginning of the 20th C, the

topics begin to include Turkish literature, Turkish history, obviously addressing issues of culture

and civilisation.

I hope however, that findings in this collection will contribute to the repertoire of Ottoman printers

and local booksellers in French, a subject that interests me in particular.

Thank you for your attention!