www.todayszaman.com Around 80,000 manuscripts from the Ottoman era and going as far back as Seljuk times have been preserved in the Sأƒآ¼leymaniye Library for the last 90 years.

Though they were scattered around 120 libraries in İstanbul during the World War I years, around 90,000 manuscripts dating back to Ottoman and Seljuk times were gathered in the madrasah within the Sأƒآ¼leymaniye compound about 90 years ago, and since then they have been preserved there.

The manager of the library, Emir Eş, said the people in Ottoman times were fond of reading and for that reason there were 200 libraries in the city, which was incomparably smaller than today. "We are talking about a society who spent most of its time reading and researching. Those 200 libraries were owned and cared for by mosques, dervish lodges, Mevlevihanes (the house of the Mevlevi Order of dervishes), charitable foundations, teacher houses, shrines and palaces or they were privately or corporately owned. That is to say, books were such an indispensable part of the daily life that the people did not need to build separate places for them for centuries," Eş emphasized.

The manuscripts that were once preserved by some 120 of the libraries were now in the Sأƒآ¼leymaniye library, Eş said, pointing out that it was no miracle that some manuscripts from centuries ago had made it to the present day. Eş also noted that the deep respect shown to manuscripts by the Ottoman people had been a vital factor that made it possible for them to reach the present day, and he added: "The people were so conscious of their value that they would never put them in humid places or, say, under anything. They not only showed respect to the Holy Qur'an by always putting it on places higher than the waistline, but they were alos very respectful toward all sorts of books."

The manager further noted that Sultan Abdأƒآ¼lhamit II gave an order that all the works preserved in the libraries be indexed and that the indexes made in those years were still in use today. "We call the manuscripts indexed in that period 'the books of Hamit's time.' We still look up Abdأƒآ¼lhamit's records in order to see whether we have a certain book. The books we currently have and the indexes made over a century ago still perfectly match each other. Although there is a very small number of books that got lost or stolen over time, the overwhelming majority of all the manuscripts has been preserved by our library," Eş said.

Technically speaking, you cannot leave it to chance for a manuscript to survive the centuries in defiance of all the bacteria and fungi, Eş stressed, and added: "The manuscripts in the library have been well-preserved, although we cannot say they were preserved in the best way possible. However, it is out of the question for the works we have here to be preserved through a trial and error method. For instance, you may well resort to a recently developed method to preserve them in a better way but may come to ruefully realize that in 30 years' time the writings may become irrevocably damaged or vanish totally. We never expose them to the rays of photocopy machines, which cause centuries-old pages to burn chemically. This fatal method first causes the pages of a book to take a pea-ish color, which will then turn brown and then end up completely black."

Eş stated that the preservation of the works was done through methods that did not involve any risks and that they were each controlled regularly and when it is necessary, they are manually repaired. "If the binding of a book is falling apart, we rebind it: Its spine is stitched again, and a bookmark is woven. If the pages get worn out in time, they are renewed in labs, but the writings are never touched. If you add a single dot anywhere, you severely damage the originality of the manuscript," Emir Eş told.

All the manuscripts in the library are being transferred onto digital media through a colossal project that has been carried out by the library since 2001, Eş noted. He said manuscripts had priority over printed books, which would make up the second leg of the project. "We have currently transferred more than 65,000 manuscripts onto digital media. Apart from some 80,000 manuscripts, we also have around 60,000 very rare printed works. However, the manuscripts have tacitly got priority."

Physically, the Sأƒآ¼leymaniye Library is among the biggest in the world, but in terms of the quality of the works it contains, it is without a doubt the most valuable, consisting of what was once contained by some 120 libraries made up of works that were presented to sultans in person, collected works and poems of the sultans, the libraries of imperial palaces and of chief religious officials (Sheikh'u-l Islam), and the works written in Ottoman madrasahs by Sufis and scholars in a large number of fields such as medicine, astronomy, mathematics, religious sciences, philology and law.
The oldest manuscript in the library dates to 1,300 years ago.

 Holding a very big number of works that gave direction to the world of science in the Ottoman Empire up until its collapse, the library has, for instance, 25 manuscripts of Fuzuli's "Leyla and Mecnun." In the library you can also find Katip أکآ§elebi's "Kashf-i Dhunoun," Evliya أکآ§elebi's "Seyahatname" (Travel Book), which is more voluminous than any other travel book ever written, and "Kitab-i Bahriye" (The Maritime Book), a scientific work by Piri Reis, who was the first person to draw a world map (1513), nearly as accurately as those drawn today.