Fonds BG-NBKM/283A - Collection of Ottoman documents, Jerusalem (Kudus) section

Global extent: 469 items stored into 7 boxes, including 250 items dated between 1840-1940; 10 documents (283a/82, 283a/179, 283a/202, 283a/240, 283a/241, 283a/242, 283a/273, 283a/285, 283a/407, 283a/414) are copious bundles in different formats.
The National Library of Bulgaria digitized these 469 items (approx. 1071 pages) in partnership with the Open Jerusalem project.

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.

Since the documents were sent from Istanbul and mostly from the former Ottoman ministry of finances’s depositories, they mainly deal with financial issues and are related to all the former Ottoman provinces ( the Balkans, Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa).

The fonds 283A includes 469 archival units (that is, folders) stored into 7 boxes. Most of the folders only contains one single document, but sometimes there are two to three, in rare cases even more documents. Some of the documents are torn and therefore are just fragments simply because the initial purpose of their transportation to Bulgaria was to be recycled in a paper mill as said above. Some other documents are in a poor condition, the edges being rotten and the text partly illegible. These damaged documents had already been taken out for chemical restoration when the inventory was made by Orlin Sabev, therefore they could not have been included into it.
The documents of fonds 283A date from the mid-16th to the early 20th century. The earliest document is dating from 1550 (fragment of a register of zeamets in the district of Doha), while the latest one is from 1908 (related to revenue collection). The 19th century documents prevail, however the number of the 17th- and 18th-century documents is also considerable. In terms of content, almost all of them deal with financial issues related mostly to incomes from taxes, expenses for the officers who guarded the fortress of Jerusalem, as well as some other minor fortresses in the region, and transfer of waqf posts with the respective salary from one holder (mostly because of his death) to another holder. Having this in mind, the documents of Fonds “Jerusalem” preserved in the National Library in Sofia could be useful for studying the socio-economic history of Jerusalem and its province during the Ottoman period.

The descriptions mention in parenthesis Gregorian dates, and into an other set of parenthesis Hijri dates and Rumi dates. When the author of the description could not read the spelling for sure, words have been put into square brackets.
In addition, the author wrote for a number of nouns the spelling in modern Turkish into parenthesis.

Finally, the nature of this fonds couldn't provide a properly structured analysis according to international standards of archival description, so we chose to divide the inventory into artificial series of 50 items, in order to ease the reading and searching.

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).

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

ISAD(G): Second Edition, Ottawa 2000.

Catalogue prepared on January 2017.

Inventory of the collection untitled “Kudus” (Ottoman documents about Jerusalem) (1670-1961), held by National Library of Bulgaria (Sofia), made by Dr Assistant Professor Orlin Sabev, 2017.