To bring order to a growing mass of imperial paperwork, the Ottoman government established Hazine-i Evrak (“Treasury of Documents”) as a modern-style records office. This institutional base later made it possible for the Republic of Turkey to inherit, reorganize, and re-describe Ottoman records rather than lose them in the political transition.
In the first year of the Republic, the former Ottoman “Treasury of Documents” was renamed, reflecting a shift from imperial to republican administration. Renaming mattered because it signaled a new chain of authority over old records, even while the documents themselves remained Ottoman in content and format.
As the Ottoman state collapsed and new republican institutions took shape, Ottoman-era archives faced a basic challenge: deciding what would be kept, where it would be housed, and which new offices would supervise it. This early transition set the stage for later transfers and cataloging in the Republican period.
By the late 1920s, the Ottoman document office was reorganized again and attached to the Prime Undersecretariat. This helped integrate inherited Ottoman records into the Republic’s central bureaucracy, an important step toward systematic control, later cataloging, and researcher access policies.
The Turkish Historical Society (Türk Tarih Kurumu) was created to promote research and publication on Turkish history, including the late Ottoman period. While not an archives agency, its scholarly mission supported demand for archival access and document publication, helping tie state records to public historical narratives.
Printed cataloging efforts in the early Republic included guides for major Ottoman repositories such as the Topkapı Palace Museum Archive. These guides were incomplete, but they show the state moving from custodianship toward finding aids—tools that let researchers discover documents by topic and reference number.
Within the Prime Ministry, a dedicated Republic Archives unit was created to organize and classify Republican-era records, alongside Ottoman holdings. Building an administrative structure for modern records also affected Ottoman materials by clarifying that the state would manage both eras through specialized archival units.
After 1980, cataloging and classification (tasnif) work at the Ottoman Archives accelerated, supported by increased resources and professionalization. A key result was the production of many new catalogs for major record series, which directly affected what researchers could locate and request.
In the early 1980s, the Ottoman Archives began issuing publication series that presented selected documents with modernized text. This publication work mattered because it widened access beyond those who could travel to Istanbul and read Ottoman script, while also showcasing the archive’s growing editorial role.
A 1982 reorganization converted the Prime Ministry archival structure and established an Ottoman Archives Department as a distinct unit. This mattered because it formalized Ottoman records as a specialized responsibility—supporting staffing, catalog production, and future modernization efforts.
Turkey created the General Directorate of State Archives in the Prime Ministry system, bringing Ottoman and Republic archives under one central authority. Centralization made it easier to standardize rules, invest in cataloging programs, and plan major facility and service upgrades.
In 1988 the archives moved into new multi-story buildings near major historic sites in Istanbul, improving working space and storage. Better facilities supported faster processing of requests and made expanded access policies more practical to carry out.
A governmental regulation issued in June 1989 removed many restrictions that had limited research—especially for documents after 1914—and eased procedures for permissions and copying. This marked a turning point from a tightly controlled repository toward a more service-oriented research archive.
In 2013, Ottoman state records were consolidated in a newly constructed archival complex in Istanbul’s Kağıthane district, replacing the older Gülhane/Bâb-ı Âli location. The move improved preservation conditions (climate control and security) and signaled a long-term commitment to housing, digitization, and researcher services at scale.
Transfer, cataloguing, and publication of the Ottoman archives in Republican Turkey (1923–2000)