History is not confined to the pages of books; sometimes it hides in the folds of a map, the lines of an old guide, or the figures of a report. Salt has joined forces with the French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA) to unearth these hidden treasures. Through this collaboration, a priceless collection of 41 rare publications and seven maps related to the Ottoman Empire and Türkiye is now accessible online.
This digital archive is like a time machine. It includes economic reports from the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (Düyûn-ı Umûmiye) dated 1902–1903, as well as city and museum guides published between 1883 and 1954 in Turkish, French, German, English, and Arabic. This collection not only preserves the official records of an era but also reveals how people of that time saw and lived in their cities. Multilingual travelogues and maps, in particular, offer windows into the diverse, multicultural fabric of the past.
All these resources have been added to the IFEA Archive within Salt Research’s City, Society, and Economy Archive, creating a new realm of discovery for researchers, enthusiasts, and artists. This is more than the digitization of an archive; it represents the democratization of history, making it accessible to all.
