442) In pursuit of Ottoman Turkish documents

A number of years ago, getting permission as a foreigner to see documents in the archives was lengthy and for a Ph.D. student or a scholar with a limited amount of time and money, a painful process… Today the process can be as short as half a day

NIKI GAMM-ISTANBUL - November 19, 2005
One hundred and fifty million documents they say ? many of which are catalogued, many of which are not. Just think of squirreling away everything a statistician could possibly want in order to crunch numbers in his computer throughout 600 years when there weren't any computers. . . . .
Just think about collecting documents, from birth certificates to petitions to decrees to communications between government offices from all over the Ottoman Empire where today there are now 40 different independent countries. It's their heritage as well as that of today's Turkish Republic.

As for the citizens of the Ottoman Empire, you might characterize them as pack rats, those people who squirrel away document after document even when you would think these won't be necessary perhaps a century or two later.

How many different archives were there until the Turkish Republic was established? One could give a list a mile long, as the phrase goes.

Until 1846 there wasn't a special building for the archives, but that didn't mean that everything was collected in the same place. Of course, the archives related to the sultan who stayed at the Topkapi Palace. Other archives stayed elsewhere, such as at Suleymaniye Library and Topkapi Palace and archives that belonged to individuals were kept in their families for decades.

The Istanbul building's archives became the Prime Ministry Archive in 1933 and eventually in 1982 a Department of Ottoman Archives was established. Two years later the Prime Ministry took full control of the archives. A General Directorate of State Archives was set up with the Directorate of Ottoman Archives in Istanbul in a new building at Sultan Ahmet but attached to the General Directorate located in Ankara.

A number of years ago, getting permission as a foreigner to see documents in the archives was lengthy and for a Ph.D. student or a scholar with a limited amount of time and money, a painful process. The same procedure of applying that had to go through the Interior Ministry took just as long if you wanted to look at a literary manuscript in a library, well, maybe a little less time -- but not much.

Today, the law has changed and now whether you're a Turkish citizen or a foreigner over 18, you have equal rights to enter and study manuscripts in the archives and the libraries. If you are already in Turkey, you can apply in person and receive your permission in one day if everything is in order. If you're abroad, then it has to go through the nearest embassy or consulate and can take up to a maximum of one month. And then you have to sign off on some 18 rules that you agree to just to ask to study what's on your listed research subject; accept that archival material that's not yet classified or is in such bad shape can't be given, don't smoke or drink in the research room, etc. Normal things in short.

In years gone by the complaints were many, especially over the length of time it took to get permission. While you listed what you wanted to study, sometimes in your research a new avenue opened up and you couldn't go anywhere with it because you had to apply for permission again. The latter is still true today, unfortunately. As for the time constraints, when you had to wait months years ago, today half a day seems to be too much for researchers who seem to have become used to 10 or 15-minute sound bites on television.

The other lingering suspicion is that when you are denied access to certain documents on the grounds that they are fragile or in poor shape, there might be some other reason behind the refusal.

Right now the archives are being microfilmed and digitalized. The plan is to put them on the Internet. The program lists ?transparency [as] the main principle of modern archival studies. Until today thousands from 80 countries have carried out or are carrying out research in the Prime Ministry archives that are being brought up to European Union standards.? As of March 2005, the General Directorate had concluded classifications for Europe, world history and the Armenian question with priority given to the Armenian question.

In addition, the General Directorate has been collecting documents from neighboring countries such as Bulgaria and Russia in order to provide full Ottoman documentation from around the world.

The Armenian debate

The idea of an attempt to commit genocide against the Armenians in eastern Turkey in the early 1900s just seems absurd. The area was one of total confusion with invading troops from Russia attempting to carve out an Armenia from Ottoman Turkish lands, virtually no health services for either side to deal with the outbreaks of disease, no food, dramatic forced marches that didn't just include Armenians, Turkish officers trying to get their salaries either for themselves or sent to their families and Kurds being incited to deal with the Armenians -- the latter seems to be something overlooked by historians but is certainly well known in Turkey.

In 1985, 69 scholars issued a statement declaring that the Armenian genocide claims were false with the idea that they could get the Ottoman Archives opened completely. Indeed that is what has happened. There are enormous amounts of material and it would be difficult at best to understand what was and wasn't there, although Armenian researchers claimed, and still claim, that many documents that didn't suit the Turkish government were destroyed.

Some academics have pointed out, however, that Armenian researchers had access to these documents during the two-and-a-half years that the Allied Forces occupied Istanbul following World War I.

And right now it seems Armenia has yet to open its archives in Yerevan and in Boston, where there is a separate but complete collection to independent researchers. One has to wonder why, or is it that they are culling the material they have so that the information that one could get might not square with other sources?

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