Issue numbers 21-22 of Zhvandūn, a popular magazine published in Afghanistan in the mid-20th century. This particular issue published on 17 August 1974, features the popular Afghan artist, Ahmad Zahir.World Digital Library (WDL), Library of Congress
More than four decades of continuous war and conflict has impacted the preservation and access to archival material in Afghanistan. As official and non-official holdings within the country were subject to heavy censorship in the 20th century by various Afghan governments, the creation of colonial and imperial archives became important sites for knowledge production on Afghanistan and its people. From the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s onwards, research centers, archives, and institutes were established largely outside of Afghanistan to provide information on the conditions of the country due to the threat of insecurity and censorship in Afghanistan itself.
The past two decades have marked an exciting turn for students and scholars of Afghanistan as new holdings within and outside the country have been established, expanded, and increasingly made easier to access. This is in large part due to the amount of funding and the new-found international attention given to Afghanistan since the early 2000s. In recent years, previously classified government documents from various countries are becoming declassified, and archival material is being digitized for public use. Other archives and holdings, such as the archives of the Afghan Presidential Palace (ARG) and the Archives of the Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) are in the process of becoming accessible to researchers in the near future.
This is a list of both physical and digital holdings currently accessible to students and researchers for the study of Afghanistan. Although the majority of the holdings, especially ones that are digitized, are easy to access for the public, the physical holdings in Afghanistan would require contacting the friendly staff –the majority of whom speak English and local languages such as Persian and Pashto– in the archives and libraries directly.
This list is organized alphabetically. Please note that due to COVID-19 access policies to archives and libraries might change.
In light of recent events in Lebanon, we want to encourage you to donate to support domestic workersvia Egna Legna, an Ethiopian domestic worker-run organization based in Beirut Lebanon, which has over the past three years assisted domestic workers including victims of horrible abuses to the best of its ability.We also recommend donating to Beit el Baraka.Use this tool to find more places that need donations.
If you’re an Arabist, think about the digital library or archive catalogues you use and then try to count the number that have interfaces and data available in Arabic. There are few in Arabic, although there are more catalogues and tools that are in Turkish. In addition, the design of these resources often is adapted without much alteration from tools produced for European-language materials for European-language audiences. It dismisses even the possibility that other intellectual histories rooted in different contexts function differently and require different things from their organizational standards; it also dismisses the notion that technologies are neutral and that they are inclusive.
A doorway in the IDEO featuring mashrabiyya (Photo Credit: N.A. Mansour)
The Arabic intellectual tradition is built around commentaries all expressing different and often diverging opinions, although they are often tied to the same text. So in order to study, for example كتاب سيبويه Kitāb Sībawayh, you need to be familiar with existing critical editions of the text. You might also want the commentaries written on it. You also naturally want the secondary sources on it as well: Arabic journal articles and monographs, as well as those written in other languages. Your institution’s standard catalogue might not be as much help here. You need a catalogue built to these bibliographic purposes. The AlKindi catalogue, developed by the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (IDEO) is the best solution to this problem of needing research tools in Arabic, built for Arabophone audiences with the Arabic intellectual tradition in mind. It’s also the solution to our bibliographical problems, essentially letting you browse online more effectively. It’s not perfect yet, namely in that it does not include every Arabic book ever written but each day, the catalogue becomes a stronger engine, as more data is added to it and as more people use it; it is often the first result you find when using a standard internet search engine to look for a text, like, say كتاب سيبويه, Kitāb Sībawayh. The cataloguing team has needed to expand multiple times to accommodate the work-load and under the direction of Mohamad Malchouch, it is full-steam ahead for the project. Here, we’ll be giving you an introduction to using the system, as well as a crash-course in cataloguing standards.
By Torsten Wollina (MSC Cofund Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin)
There are several noteworthy initiatives in Germany that are pushing the boundaries of #openaccess to both sources and secondary literature. Only recently, a joint project of several German university and research libraries has received funding for creating an online union catalogues for manuscripts in the Arabic script held by those libraries (named Orient digital). Leipzig University is home to the long-term project Bibliotheca Arabica which aims at a reassessment of Arabic literary history by putting it in conversation with manuscript studies. Unofficially, it has already been described as Brockelmann 2 (or 2.0). The digitization project Translatio at Bonn University is currently identifying periodicals in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish published between 1860 and 1945 and makes them accessible online. Yet another initiative is the Bamberger Islam-Enzyklopädie headed by Patrick Franke. It provides a framework which aims at engaging scholars to disseminate their expertise on Wikipedia in German. Through this encyclopedia, authored Wikipedia articles become visible as citable publications.
At the moment, by far the largest initiative towards #openaccess is hosted by the University- and State Library Saxony-Anhalt (Halle). It offers two main online resources: MENALIB is the virtual specialist library but I will be focusing here on the online repository MENAdoc because it is, in my opinion, a truly unique treasure trove of primary and secondary sources.
At the moment, even if you can concentrate on work, you might encounter several unanticipated challenges. One of them is access to literature absent from the large-scale repositories such as JStor, academia.edu or your own library. Archives and libraries remain unreachable. Archivists and librarians are doing all they can to move as much online as they can but they too should look out for themselves and their loved ones first and foremost. And while researchers and teachers cannot (I repeat: can not) do the work that archivists and librarians do, what we can do at the present moment is come together and engage in the age-old practice of sharing resources. And while this is being done already in many instances bilaterally, this contribution is concerned with a way to do it communally, to help students and teachers get around paywalls and other current inhibitors. Of course, this will always be useful to those without institutional access.
Here, I will present one way of using an existing platform to share documents, be they books, articles, images, or even sound files. The general idea is to bring together people needing a certain article, book, image or other sort of image, recording or source with others who have access to it. A kind of academic Ebay, maybe? While the browser based app Trello is first and foremost a project management tool, it is flexible enough to serve this purpose. It has several advantages.
Ever since podcasting hit the scene in the early 2000s, there has been no shortage of content on the Middle East, North Africa, the Islamicate world, and on Muslims. We’ve assembled a list here –subject to eventual updates and suggestions– of podcasts on history, current events, and culture from the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and the Islamic(ate) world more generally. We have also included a few other podcasts on Muslim cultural and intellectual matters. This list is by no means exhaustive and we look forward to developing it more: you can DM us suggestions on Twitter or Facebook and you can email us or comment below.
For those of you who are uninitiated in the ways of podcasts, a basic guide: you can either listen to them streamed from their sites on your computer or tablet or you can download a podcast catcher app (iPhones come preloaded with the Podcast app). Many are uploaded to Soundcloud (which is both a website and an app). Other podcast apps include Overcast, Stitcher, Anchor, Breaker, PodTail, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Once you’ve installed the apps, search by podcast title (or episode title) to find what you’re looking for. You can choose to subscribe or just listen to individual episodes (either via downloads or streaming) If you are having problems finding the podcasts on your podcast catcher of choice, please visit the podcast’s homepage to see if it is only available on certain platforms.
We at Hazine love our lists. So hot off the heels of our visual resource guide and our regularly updated blog-list, we have a list of online resources to share with you all: this is where you can find primary sources online or resources to help you get at primary sources. An earlier incarnation of this list is here, written by Zachary Foster. We’re including links to digitized Islamic manuscripts, digitized periodicals, digitized books, oral history repositories, online syllabi and material history archives, all relevant to Middle East, North African, Islamicate world, and Islamic studies. Note while many of these are open access, some are not. Standard rules apply: this is not a comprehensive list so tweet at us or email us and we’ll add things to our semi-annual updates to this list.
Manuscript digitization projects are increasing accessibility to researchers who, for a variety of reasons, cannot access collections in person. The Manuscripts of the Muslim World project is one such exciting project to hit the scene, not least because they actively share recently digitized manuscripts on their active Twitter account. We talked to Project Cataloger Dr Kelly Tuttle about its place in the digital humanities landscape and how to use this exciting new tool.
Describe your academic background and involvement with the MMW project?
I have a PhD in Arabic from the University of Pennsylvania and use manuscripts frequently in my own research. Right after I completed the degree, I worked in a library for a year while I looked for a traditional academic job. Once I found one, I discovered that was not really what I wanted to be doing, so when this position was posted, I jumped on it. It has been great to return to library work and to see this variety of manuscripts. Every day is different and I’m learning so much. As far as what I do for the project itself, I’m the cataloguer, which means that I try to identify and describe each manuscript that is part of the project. I’m sure I make mistakes, but fortunately, there is a growing team of volunteers who are willing to contribute their advice to the project, when asked. I also produce the metadata for the digital images that appear on OPenn, an open access repository for primary source materials.What is MMW, and what is its current status
MMW stands for Manuscripts of the Muslim World (also called Muslim World Manuscripts by one of the participating repositories). It is a project supported by a 3-year Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and is currently in the beginning of its second year. As the grant name suggests, it is a cooperative effort to digitize and catalog the ‘hidden’ Islamicate manuscripts held in three repositories: Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College are also contributing holdings to the project. The collections were considered ‘hidden’ because many of the Islamicate manuscripts have been lingering uncatalogued in these repositories and therefore have remained largely unseen and unresearched. We hope that this grant will help make researchers, students, and other interested parties more aware of the holdings at each of these repositories and encourage their use. Since the manuscripts will also all be digitized in high quality file formats, anyone will be able to make use of these resources even if they are not able to come to the area in person. Since this is a cooperative project, there are many different players involved. Each institution has a project lead, Mitch Fraas at Penn, Caitlin Goodman at Free Library, and Kate Harcourt at Columbia along with many other support personnel who help keep everything running smoothly. Deserving of special mention here are the staff at the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI) at Penn and the Digital Imaging Lab at Columbia, who photograph everything, as well as the Digital Content team at Penn, who make everything available on OPenn, and at Columbia who add the holdings to the Internet Archive.
Andrea-Nunez: She is the photographer for this project at Penn. Here, she is photographing a Shāhnāmah from Free Library.
Do you have any advice for researchers who plan to use these collections?
Many of these manuscripts have been languishing unattended for a good, long while. Therefore, the time is right to poke around, find fun things to study, and bring the knowledge to the public. Browse the collections! I’m sure you’ll find something that interests you. So far, things that have stuck in my head while cataloging are that Columbia holds quite a number of teaching texts, and math and science works, in addition to some rather rare items, like a commentary in Aljamiado (Ms. Or. 515) and a forgery (Ms. Or. 388) produced in Palermo in the late 18th century. A blog post from the Columbia library gives some details about the collectors who provided most of the collection and some of what you will find in it. The Free Library has an excellent collection of illustrated manuscripts, including one illustrated version of part of the life of Emperor Akbar which is quite different from anything I’ve seen before (Lewis O 45). Penn and Bryn Mawr each have rather eclectic collections with some unique items. What immediately comes to mind from Penn is a Qur’ān that was copied in Malta (Ms. Codex 1904) and a divination book that has some fun illustrations (Ms. Codex 1898) and from Bryn Mawr a Shāhnāmah that is in an excellent state of semi-finishedness (BMC 65) with illustrations in all stages of development. Haverford has a good collection of Syriac manuscripts along with some Arabic and Persian, one of which a former owner has decorated with a number of rather awesome marginal doodles (Haverford College, Quaker & Special Collections mss. RH 66). The project is only half done, though, so more interesting things will surely be turning up!
Columbia_MsOr515: Folio 4v, Risālah, late 16th century. Text in Aljamiado, Spanish in Arabic letters.
For those of you browsing the digital collections, OPenn is a great repository, but it can look a little bare bones if you are used to the page-turning type of digital repository. With that in mind, if you go to the OPenn site you can read the introduction to find out how to use the repository and cite the works . You can then browse by repository , or, for this collection you can go to ‘Curated Collections’ and then to ‘Manuscripts of the Muslim World’ . Once you are there, you can search by Shelfmark, or browse through the holdings. The images, records, and metadata are all there for the taking. Please do help yourselves; it is all open access.
What are some challenges you’ve encountered in cataloging these manuscripts?
No one can be expert in all aspects of Islamicate manuscripts, and for a collection like this one, which is eclectic, spans 10 centuries, and covers areas from West Africa to India, I frequently run into things I’ve not seen before and for which I have very little reference. Thankfully, there is a growing set of resources for Islamicate manuscripts. There are still large areas, however, that are yet to be studied more fully. Perso-Indian manuscripts are one obvious example. I am not familiar with the tradition from my own training or research, but they exist in these particular collections in fairly significant numbers, and I am undoubtedly missing nuances of the copies and history as I catalog. Illustrated manuscripts present another type of challenge since I have had only minimal art historical training. I ask for outside help about the manuscripts with which I have difficulties, but sometimes answers are slow to come. I hope that having all the manuscripts available publicly will encourage people to get in touch with suggested revisions and improvements to the records, especially with regard to the structural metadata for illustrations. Another challenge has been with languages that I cannot read, but which form part of the collection; fortunately, volunteers have come to my rescue in cases like that. The project has been lucky, and I am extremely grateful, that so many people have been willing to donate their time and expertise when we need it. I hope the volunteers will continue to contribute their input.
What is your favorite manuscript you’ve worked on so far?
I don’t have a favorite, because there are cool things about each of the manuscripts I’ve worked on so far. I like anything that is a bit of a challenge, for which I need to do some digging. I also like anything that teaches me something new (so that is basically every manuscript out there). I also like finding connections between these manuscripts and manuscripts in other repositories, for example shared owner’s notes or stamps, or a scribe who copied one of these manuscripts and who I can actually then find listed elsewhere. The collections in the project were not built very systematically and so these connections do not often appear, so when they do, it is particularly nice. I also quite like it when the manuscripts seem like they’ve had a long, interesting life—when they have lots of marginalia, for example, or numerous owner’s notes, or tipped in notes and explanations. All of that is fun.
Could you tell us a bit about the advantages and disadvantages of working with digital images of manuscripts?
Since the project is based at Penn, I don’t actually see the Columbia manuscripts in person, for the most part. I therefore catalog their holdings from digital images and preliminary records that graduate students at Columbia have been learning to create. This has the advantage of letting me work remotely, but the disadvantage of obscuring some elements that would be noticeable in person. Knowledge of the paper is the most obvious drawback to digital images. You cannot look through a digital image as you would a piece of paper to see watermarks and laid and chain lines, for example. It is also more difficult to tell anything about the weight or texture of paper. Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether it has been blind-ruled or not. So, that’s a drawback. Another drawback is size distortion that comes about via digital images. A side effect of having all the images show up the same size on the monitor is that I sometimes lose track of whether I’m looking at a pocket-sized or a monumentally-sized Qurʾān, for example. That isn’t the fault of the digitizers or anything, and the measurements are of course provided along with the images, but it is easy to forget and think of all the books as the same size when they aren’t in front of you in person. A benefit of digital images, though, is the manipulability of them, which is to say they can be enlarged, cropped, rotated, and flicked through quickly without doing damage to the item. That aspect of digital images has been supremely useful in this project for reading small text, scribbly notes, for magnifying portions of the page for detail.
Is it possible for people to contribute to MMW?
In the sense that people can contribute their observations about the manuscripts, yes! Contribution is welcome and encouraged. Please do look at the digital images and decipher things that still need deciphering. Owner’s notes for example, stamps, other notes that were illegible to me, but might be legible to you, identifying what’s going on in an illustration so that I can update the structural metadata. In that sense, yes, we welcome contributions. In fact, if you have observations about provenance agents (owners, scribes, buyers, sellers, borrowers, lenders, readers, brokers, waqf donors/recipients, etc.) that you can identify in any of these manuscripts and you want to enter that information, along with the transcribed note, into the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, that would be a significant help.
Penn_LJS405: Folio 1v, copy of Tasʹhīl al-naẓar wa-taʻjīl al-ẓafar, 14th century? This is an example of a leaf covered in owner’s notes. Help transcribing this type of thing is welcome and can be added to the Schoenberg Database by you, yourself! Please contribute.
Dr Kelly Tuttle is the project cataloger for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World grant. She is located at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and is reachable via email at tuttlek@upenn.edu. You can also follow the project on Twitter: @MmwProject.
The last ten years alone have seen a boom in digital resources for Islamicists and historians of the Middle East. Be it bibliographical tools, like Jara’id, or online photo archives, like Akkasah, the future will only continue to see the expansion of our toolkits, inspiring new research questions in the process. One such tool is the Islamic Painted Page (IPP). In honor of the site’s relaunch this month, we have an interview with its creator, Stephen Serpell.
We recently tweeted out some of our favorite blogs to follow: we threw out a couple of names you probably know and some you might not have had the chance to follow. Then our followers (and some of the people we tagged) tweeted back at us some of their favorites (particular shout-outs to Rich Heffron, Hind Makki and M Lynx Qualey). Here it is, in list form, if you don’t follow us on Twitter. Please either comment bellow on your favorites, tweet at us, or email us at hazineblog@gmail.com and we’ll update the list as we go along!
The Historical Archive of Macedonia (Ιστορικό Αρχείο Μακεδονίας hereafter IAM) is located in Thessaloniki, Greece, and comprises a rich, albeit to a large degree unexplored, Ottoman archive. A curious researcher will find there, among other things, the main repository of archives produced by the Ottoman administration and belonging to the region of the Selanik sub-province (Selanik sancağı).[1] It is astonishing how few scholars have dealt with the archive of an Ottoman city as important as Selanik, especially considering the quantity of its holdings (comprising more than 4,000 bound Ottoman registers and an important number of loose documents) and the range of time it covers (1690-1912).
Ottoman map of the Province of Selanik.
History
The IAM was established in Thessaloniki in 1954. It is one of the forty-eight regional State Archives and operates as an independent branch under the authority of the Greek Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs. Following the archive’s official establishment, the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Appeal Court of Thessaloniki, which had kept the city’s Ottoman archives since 1953, transferred the collection to the IAM, as a result of the coordinated efforts of its director, Prof. Vassilios Dimitriadis. Between 1912—when the city of Selanik was incorporated into the Greek Kingdom—and 1953, the Ottoman archives were located in the translation office of Thessaloniki and operated under the authority of the city’s Court of First Instance. This translation office maintained the city’s Ottoman records and provided translation services of official documents (mostly title deeds) to private citizens. By 1956, the IAM added the archives of other translation offices in nearby towns, such as Katerini, Poligiros, Kilkis, Edessa (see below for the Ottoman names of these places).
After occupying various central buildings of the city, the IAM moved to its present building in 1994. The Russian community of Thessaloniki built the archive’s current building, known as the Russian hospital, in the first decade of the twentieth century with funding from the Russian government. After the October Revolution and the dissolution of the Russian community of Thessaloniki, the building was taken by the Greek state, which used it as a maternity hospital until the mid-1970s, when it was abandoned.
Collections
The IAM contains mainly an archive and a reference library. All research and reading take place in the library room.
Archive: While the majority of the archival material consists of Ottoman documents, the IAM also contains archives produced by the administration of the Greek state after 1912. This collection comprises administrative and judicial material (e.g. decisions of the town’s Court of First Instance, documentation of famous court cases like Gr. Lambrakis or G. Polk), ecclesiastical archives, notarial documents, archives of private Greek schools (e.g. Valagianni School), public schools (e.g. Girls’ School) or large factories/enterprises (e.g. Fix, Allatini), etc.
The Ottoman archival collection includes 4,000 bound registers and several loose documents produced over more than two centuries, which concern the sancak of Selanik. As the archive contains records for the entire sancak of Selanik, the collection includes significant material for nearby cities, such as Poligiros in today’s Chalkidiki (Poliroz), Katerini (Katrin), Kilkis (Avrethisar), Edessa (Vodinα), and Veria (Karaferye). These archives can be separated into the following categories:
Sicill archives (ιεροδικαστικά αρχεία):[2] This collection comprises 373 bound registers, which range from 1694 to 1912, and covers the longest period of all other documents in this archive. The vast majority of these registers belong to the kadı court of Selanik (337 registers, 1694-1912), while the rest belongs to the kadı courts of the districts of Katrin (3 registers, 1888-1912), Avrethisar (22 registers, 1814-1912) and Ksendire (today’s Kassandra in Chalkidiki) (11 registers, 1870-1912). Although the registers start in 1694, they also include copies of documents from earlier times. The registers range in size from 20 to 400 pages each and include not only judicial rulings, but also documentation associated with imperial decrees and administrative or military correspondence. The sicill archives of Selanik are available both in microfilm and in digital format, although they are not yet available online (for digitized archives available also online see below. It is not certain yet, when the digitized sicill archives of Selanik will be put online). The sicills originating from Katrin, Avrethisar and Ksendire are available only in their original form. An exception here is the sicill archive of the town of Karaferye (Veria, 1602-1882), which is available in microfilm and digitally, as well as online under the heading Αρχεία Ν. Ημαθίας (Archives of the Prefecture of Imathia).
Court Archives (nizamiyye mahkemeleri, τακτικά δικαστήρια): These records comprise 762 bound registers and 233 files dated between 1868 and 1912. They document the judicial system as it was set up following the Tanzimat reforms and the establishment of the nizamiyye mahkemeleri with the production of new penal codes and the new Civil Code, the Mecelle. In particular, they are comprised of the archives of the Court of First Instance of Selanik (Πρωτοδικείο Θεσσαλονίκης, 1877-1912), the Trade Court of Selanik (Εμποροδικείο Θεσσαλονίκης, 1868-1912), the Courts of First Instance of Avrethisar (1884-1912), Vodina (1885-1912), Karacova (1906-1912), Katrin (1887-1912), Ksendire (1882-1912) and Karaferye (not fully cataloged yet). They are available only in their original form. Hardly any research has been conducted in this section.
Land Registers (κτηματολογικά αρχεία): This collection constitutes the most voluminous one, with 1,821 bound registers and 25 files, ranging from 1830 to 1912. Many of these registers (725) belong to the central cadastre of Selanik (1858-1912), although the collection also contains the land registers of the districts of the Selanik province (1844-1912), the land registers of the religious endowments (the vakıf registers) (1830-1912), the land register of the vakıf of Gazi Evrenos (1845-1912), the register office of Ksendire (1872-1912), Katrin (1865-1912), Avrethisar (1872-1912), Vodena (1872-1912), the land registers of Karaferye (1872-1908) and the registers of the translation office of Thessaloniki (1909, 1912-1953), Veroia (1915-1953) and Chalkidiki. The central cadastre of Selanik is digitized and available online (for the years 1871-1908), while the vakıf register and the land register of the vakıf of Gazi Evrenos are fully digitized, but only accessible at the archive. All the other documents in this collection are only available in their original format.
Tax registers: These records consist of 1,255 bound registers produced between 1872 and 1907 for Selanik (1872-1907), Karacova (1876), Vodina (1876), Avrethisar, Katrin (1873-1875), Ksendire (1873-1875) and Karaferye (1905-1912). Only the tax register of Selanik is digitized and available online. The rest may be consulted at the archive.
The land and tax registers are the most frequently consulted collections in the archive, especially for the years after 1860. Most of the interest in these materials stems from private persons in search of title deeds or genealogical information; these deeds are mainly used for litigation purposes between individuals or between individuals and the state.
Administrative registers: These registers consist of 152 bound registers and 27 files covering the period from 1875 to 1912 and include the archive of the administrative council of the province of Selanik (Selanikvilayeti) between 1875 and 1912; the archive of the administrative councils of the districts of Avrethisar (1908-1912); Karacova (1907-1912), and Katrin (1897-1912); the archive of the central forest authority of Selanik (1893-1912) and the regional forest authorities of the Selanik vilayeti (1896-1912). While three volumes of the Selanik vilayeti archive have been digitized, most records in this section are available only in their original format.
The digitized sections that are available online can be found here.
The Reference Library: The library contains about 3,000 volumes. The books have to be read in the library or can be photocopied outside the archive. They deal mainly with the history of Thessaloniki and its surroundings, although the library has also a nice collection of Karamanlidika (Turkish in Greek script) books. In addition, one can also find Greek-Turkish dictionaries, as well as academic journals and collections like Turcica, Archivum Ottomanicum, Islamic Law & Society, and The Cambridge History of Islam.
Researchers at work in the archive’s library.
Research Experience
Research in this archive is quite easy-going and does not require any special procedure. The archive’s personnel speak English and French.
Almost all of the material in the archives is publicly accessible (except sensitive personal data such as adoption files or the ones which are labeled as confidential) and generally no special procedure of admission is required. Researchers are asked to fill in an application form, merely for statistical reasons, and can then immediately proceed to their research. However, researchers wishing to study large parts of the archival collection or coming for a lengthy period of time to study a specific collection are strongly recommended to communicate with IAM well beforehand in order for the required material to be prepared. These researchers are also requested to proffer some form of certification (e.g. recommendation letter of supervisor, etc.). The archive requires researchers to obtain permission from the curator of the General State Archives when requesting reproductions of a significant portion of the archives or the digital reproduction of an entire collection.
Material can be requested at any time of the day (9:00-15:00), and, in most cases, it is delivered shortly thereafter. If a researcher wishes to see more than one or two registers per day, he or she is requested to inform the librarians a day beforehand. There are two computers in the library room, at which digitized material can be viewed. In cases in which the digitized copy is not clear, the archive will also provide the originals. If the requested material has not been digitized, the archive will make available the original document for the researcher.
Unfortunately, the library room is rather small, with less than ten seating places, and can also be a bit noisy sometimes while librarians are coming and going. There is no wireless internet access. While the space does not create ideal research conditions, the close contact and exchange with personnel and other researchers partly compensates for this shortcoming, as is often the case in smaller, local archives.
Cataloging is rather short and descriptive, and only in Greek. The catalogs are not published volumes, but rather sheets of paper kept together in dossiers. There exists a general catalog (available also from the website of the archive; works only with Firefox and IE), as well as a catalog of the vakıf register, and of the sicill archives of Selanik, Avrethisar and Karaferye. The registers are listed in chronological order and in some cases include information about the content. Despite the poor cataloging, the personnel is very helpful in finding the requested material.
Accessibility
The archives are open to researchers from Monday to Friday, between 9:00 and 15:00, except all official holidays of the Greek state. The archive is wheelchair accessible via a special entrance from a side-road, while a special lift facilitates access to the library room on the first floor.
Transportation and Food
The archives are located quite centrally, a walking distance of about 20 to 25 minutes from the city’s center. They can also be accessed by the bus lines 2, 10, 11, 58,, all of which pass various stops along the central Egnatia Street. Bus tickets can be obtained at small kiosks in every corner of the city, or inside the bus. The buses stop in front of the archive building, at the Eυκλείδη stop. Depending on the traffic, buses generally reach the archive stop in ten minutes.
There is no cafeteria inside the archives, although there are plenty of cafes and small restaurants located nearby.
Exterior view of the archive.
Reproduction Requests and Costs
Copies of archival material can be obtained in either paper or digital format. Researchers may also photograph material themselves. The costs are 0.50 euros per copy for an A4-page, 0.30 euros per digital copy, and 0.10 euros for each photograph taken by the researcher. There are no limits in the material one may ask to be copied, but if it is a “large quantity”, special permission may be needed. There even exists the possibility to request material from abroad with a CD of the digitized material sent by post to the researcher.
I thank Mrs. Giannoukakou for providing me with valuable information and material concerning the IAM. I have used the following material for writing this article:
-Αμαλία Παππά-Καραπιδάκη, Τα Οθωμανικά Αρχεία του Ιστορικού Αρχείου Μακεδονίας (The Ottoman Archives of the Historical Archive of Macedonia), σελ. 55-64 and Κίρκη Γεωργιάδου, Το Ευρετήριο των Ιεροδικαστικών Κωδίκων της Θεσσαλονίκης (The Index of the Registers of the Kadi Courts of Thessaloniki), σελ. 65-68 and Κωνσταντίνος Γιαντσής, Οθωμανικό Κτηματολόγιο (Ottoman Cadastre), σελ. 69-72, in Ν. Καραπιδάκης (επιμ.), Επετηρίδα των Γενικών Αρχείων του Κράτους – 1990, Αθήνα: Βιβλιοθήκη Γενικών Αρχείων του Κράτους, 1991.
-Υπουργείο Πολιτισμού, Υπουργείο Βόρειας Ελλάδας, Νεώτερα Μνημεία της Θεσσαλονίκης, Παλιό Ρωσσικό Νοσοκομείο – Πρώην Δημόσιο Μαιευτήριο, σελ. 172.
Anna Vakali is a graduate student at the University of Basel, where she studies crime and intercommunal relations in Ottoman Selanik and Manastır during the Tanzimat reforms.
2 April 2014
Cite this: Anna Vakali, “The Historical Archive of Macedonia in Thessaloniki”, HAZİNE, 2 April 2014, https://hazine.info/2014/04/02/archive-macedonia-thessaloniki/
[1] I will use the Ottoman term Selanik when referring to the city of Thessaloniki during Ottoman rule.
[2]I have included the Greek names as well, because the catalogs are available only in Greek language.
