History

The history of archives and archives administration in Türkiye is quite old. This stems, mainly, from the fact that state tradition goes back to very early periods in the lives of Turkish and Turkic people. The Ottomans, like their predecessors, Anatolian Seljuks, have kept an enormous amount of records, although most of them date back to the period after the conquest of Istanbul.

The Ottomans had a very efficient records keeping AND information system. It was part of the daily bureaucratic practice to refer to records one, two or at times three centuries old.

The Ottomans also employed very effective preservation methods, which enabled their records to reach the Turkish Republic without much damage. This was made possible thanks to the importance the Ottomans attributed to their records; they referred to their archives as the "treasury of records" (Hazine-i Evrak).

Today:

Unfortunately, today, we are far from reaching their standards and level of competence. The number of organizations in modern Türkiye where the quality of the service is upto modern archival standards is, unfortunately, only a few.

• Of these, the biggest and best organized is, naturally, the National Archives. Please note, however, that its site is totally in Turkish, as of this writing. If you need information in English, you can visit my National Archives page, for this purpose, which now carries Information for Genealogical Researchers,too.
• Next in line, are public, private and third sector organizations whose archives and record systems are taken care of by graduates of the Department of Archives Studies at Marmara University .
• To these, one should add, those organizations, whose archives and records systems are set up as projects undertaken by the Department itself.
  Unfortunately, apart form the National Archives, non of these has got a web page to link to, except for the parent organization's main site, which is already listed under the relevant section. However, one them is designed by me and hosted on this server:
  That of the Women's Library , collections of which are undertaken personally, with the help of undergraduate students.
• The fourth category of archival institutions, be it public, private or third sector organizations, are those which are taken care by people who are neither staff nor graduates of the Department . However, these are even less in number and one of the rare cases, which is upto modern archival standards, is that of the Ottoman Bank, the archives of which are arranged and described under the supervision of a classmate of mine, Prof. Dr. Edhem Eldem, from Bogaziçi University.

For a list of archival organizations which have got a web site, see our Links page.

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