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Arabic documents related to Ottoman Jerusalem. (“al-Quds”)

1866 February 21 to 22 (1282 Šawwāl 5-6), al-Quds, Maḍbaṭa from the members of the Managing Council of al-Quds and sanad

Held by National Library of Bulgaria (NBKM)

Identity area

Reference BG-NBKM/F283AR/a.u.25
Title 1866 February 21 to 22 (1282 Šawwāl 5-6), al-Quds, Maḍbaṭa from the members of the Managing Council of al-Quds and sanad
Dates 1866-02-21-1866-02-22
Dates Start 1866-02-21
Dates End 1866-02-22
Level of description Item
Extend and medium 2 leaves, 35,2 x 21 cm and 22 x 14 cm; white, thin and yellowish, very thin, deed paper; black; ruq'a.

Context area

Repository National Library of Bulgaria (NBKM)
Name of creator(s) Ministry of Finance of the Ottoman Empire (ML)

Content and structure area

Description For the maḍbaṭa, members of the Managing Council of al-Quds: Faydi Islam, qādī; Muhammad Tahir, mudīr mal; Muhammad Tahir, muftī; as-sayyid Muhammad Nas'at, mudīr tahrirat and others.
Sanad by which the payment of 2252 ġurūš from the ḫazinā of al-Quds is verified. The sum represents the cost of the wax, olive oil and others necessary for the lighting of the building of the Managing Council and the departments in the governmental sarāy during the nights of the month Ramadan 1282 (from January 1st to February 16, 1866).
Supplementary notes of financial authorities in Ottoman Turkish.
Dated 1282 Šawwāl 5-6 according to Ottoman religious (Islamic) calendar.
Identifier in 1984 Sofia's catalogue: N°453, page 208.

Conditions of access and use

Language of material Arabic
Ottoman Turkish

Catalogue references area

Sources http://www.archives.openjerusalem.org/index.php/1866-february-21-to-22-1282-sawwal-5-6-al-quds-madbata-from-the-members-of-the-managing-council-of-al-quds-and-sanad?sf_culture=en

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Identity area

Reference BG-NBKM/F283AR
Title Arabic documents related to Ottoman Jerusalem. (“al-Quds”)
Covering dates 1647-07-11-1874-02-15
Dates Start 1647-07-11
Dates End 1874-02-15
Level of description Fonds
Extend and medium Global extent: unknown; 24 selected and described archival units, 53 pages

Context area

Repository National Library of Bulgaria (NBKM)
Name of creator(s) Ministry of Finance of the Ottoman Empire (ML)
Archival history 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.

Content and structure area

Description 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 preface of 1984 Sofia’s catalogue explains the way the archival units are described:
[p. 30] From the point of view of diplomatics, the archives in Arabic and Ottoman-Turkish offer mainly the same documents: maktub, daftar, mahdar, sanad, etc. [...].
[p. 31] The elements of the description of each document are defined first of all by the characteristics of the material itself and by the ideas already expressed, concerning the importance of this archive which appears to be a solid basis for the study of important aspects of the economic, political, cultural and religious life of the people of North Africa, the Near and the Middle East, the Caucasus, etc. in the age of the Ottoman-Turkish feudalism. The experience of Bulgarian archivists, who have published archives in Bulgarian and foreign languages, preserved in the National Library and other institutions in the country has been taken into consideration.
In general every description of a document consists of two parts. Part I includes the following elements: date, place of issue, type and number of documents, author, addressee, a brief content and supplementary notes on it.
The date of issue or writing of the document is given first according to the Christian calendar and thereafter the Moslem (i.e. as it is given in the original). When one description contains several documents of different dates, we indicate the earliest and the latest with a dash (-) between the two. Thus we show the whole period covered by the documents [...]. In cases when there is no date on the document, or there are only fragments of the document whose date was eventually on the missing part we proceed as follows:
- if possible we date the document according to the historical event described in it [...].
- when the documents mention Turkish sultans or Grand wazirs, the date is given according to their rule. In cases when names of other well-known people in the political history of the Arab countries are mentioned and whose biographical data cannot be defined, we date the document according to their activity reflected in
it. If such a document bears also a stamp with a date, we record it at the end thus confirming our considerations when dating it.
- in the cases when we date the documents only according to the Moslem date recorded on the seal of the document, we give only the initial date of the corresponding Christian year, which means that the document has not been written before that date.
Provided there is no way to date a document, because we cannot make use of any of the above-mentioned possibilities, we resort to paleographic data (paper, watermark, script, ink, handwriting). In such cases we denote the century only and when it is possible to be more concrete, supplement it with phrases like "the
beginning", "the end", "the first half", etc. [...].


The place of issue of the document shows the settlement in which it has been written or prepared and is given immediately after the date. When the name of the town is missing in the document but we can still define it by logical considerations we write it down in square brackets. When there is no possibility to define the place of issue we use the abbreviation "s.l." (sine loco).

The type of document (daftar, maktub, raftiyya, kasf, etc.) is not always mentioned in the text itself (or above it). In such case we define it on the basis of some principles in the Ottoman-Turkish diplomatics. When the description includes several documents of the same kind, the figure in brackets after the name
of the document shows their number [...]. When the archive unit contains documents of another type also, in some cases for clarity we mark down in brackets which consecutive leaf is the described document.

The author is the person or the authority that has issued the document. In most cases it comes from the same settlement in which the document has been prepared. For that reason the settlement is not mentioned again after his name and office. The name of the author is given in square brackets when it is missing in the document and it has been identified indirectly.

The addressee is the person or the institution to whom the document is addressed and the settlement where he is to be found. This element is not present in all descriptions, since in most cases it is difficult to be established. All additionally fixed data are placed also in square brackets.

The content of the document is the most important part of the description. Our ambition is to render it fully as much as possible and to give in concise form that information in the document which will be made use in further studies. The annotations points out first of all the event and the persons taking part in it, their position and titles, also the names of settlements, gamis, mazra'as, muqata'as, or it is mentioned whether the document contains such information.It is mentioned also whether the archive unit includes documents in Ottoman-Turkish and if so their content is also reflected in the annotation.


The supplementary notes can be of various kind, but the most common are the additional entries. These are the legalizations, notes, decisions, resolutions, accounts, etc., made on the top or in the margins of the main text by the financial authorities, predominantly in Ottoman Turkish. Moreover, in the earlier documents they are in “siyaqat”, “diwani” or in “inge diwani”. In order to avoid repetition, these details were not included in the description.

When the annotated document is “hugga zahriyya” (“hügget-i zahriyye”) we mention also the type of the document (original or copy in Ottoman-Turkish) given at the back. If the document was prepared by a person other than the one that had issued the “hugga zahriyya”, we mention his name and position as well [...].
Part II of the description of the documents is concerned with their paleographic characteristics. It includes the following elements: number and size of leaves, paper, condition of the document and text in respect to their preservation, watermark, ink, script, seals and reasons for dating.
Accruals The collection is closed.
System of arrangement The original system is lost.
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.

Conditions of access and use

Conditions governing access Subject to the authorization of National Library of Bulgaria (NBKM)
Finding aids Inventory of the documents in Arabic language kept in the Oriental department of the Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia, XIII-XX c., compiled by Stojanka Kenderova, edited by Dr. Victor Lebedev, translated into English by L. Zaharieva, Sofia, 1984.

Catalogue references area

Rules or conventions International standard for archival description, General, etc.
Date of the catalogue Catalogue prepared on 1984 - revised on January 2017
Archivist's notes Inventory of 24 items (archival units) from the collection n° F283AR entitled “Arabic documents related to Ottoman Jerusalem (“al-Quds”)” (1647-1874), held by the National Library of Bulgaria (Sofia), made by Stoyanka Kenderova, 2017.
Sources http://www.archives.openjerusalem.org/index.php/arabic-documents-related-to-ottoman-jerusalem-al-quds

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