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.
