Reşad Ekrem Koçu’s Istanbul Encyclopedia Archive, owned by Kadir Has University and operated jointly with SALT since 2018, has been made available online.
Kadir Has University will organize the Istanbul Encyclopedia for online access. Koçu’s Istanbul: The New Face of the Encyclopedia will bring together the stakeholders of the project at the event. Kadir Has University Faculty of Art and Design Faculty Member Dr. Gürbey HİZ, Kadir Has University Architecture and Urban Studies Master’s Program Lecturer Prof. Dr. Bülent TANJU, Salt Research Web and Social Media Director Gamze CEBECİ, Salt Archive Responsible Mehtap KURU will talk about all aspects of the 6-year Istanbul Encyclopedia project at the event to be moderated by Kadir Has University Information Center Manager Serap ÖZYURT. The event will be held on Friday, October 25 at 14.00 at Kadir Has University’s Cibali Campus.
More than 40 Thousand Documents About Istanbul’s Past
This unique project, which bears witness to history, contains more than 40,000 documents about Istanbul’s fascinating past. The 11 printed volumes (AG) of the Istanbul Encyclopedia, published by Reşad Ekrem Koçu between 1944 and 1973, are available online for the first time. In addition, the Encyclopedia’s never-before-published GZ articles and the comprehensive archive collected are included on this platform for the first time, and the Encyclopedia is completed from A to Z.
About Reşad Ekrem Koçu’s Istanbul Encyclopedia
Istanbul Encyclopedia is a comprehensive work to which historian and novelist Reşad Ekrem Koçu (1905-1975) devoted most of his life, but could not complete it. Koçu continued his comprehensive source scanning and article writing work, which he started in 1944 to create the “magnificent register” of Istanbul, until his death. The first 11 volumes up to the letter G of the encyclopedia, planned by Koçu as 24 volumes, were printed as fascicles at intervals until 1973.
From streets to architectural structures, from important or ordinary individuals to the customs of the city, from historical events to urban legends, many topics are recorded with different narratives and pictures. Contributed by valuable historians, literary figures, academics and artists of the period, the Istanbul Encyclopedia is a reference source that combines the tradition of biographies with Western encyclopedism, a compilation of testimonies, or a gigantic attempt to include everything about Istanbul, as well as combining all this material into a unique Istanbul. It is an extraordinary work that reconstructs the idea or image.
Koçu, who witnessed the transformation of Istanbul from the capital of the Ottoman Empire to a province of the Republic of Turkey, includes the everyday and ordinary in the narrative, from accidents to murders, from tourists to waiters, from coffee houses to baths, while depicting the city. The Istanbul Encyclopedia, which was published with articles from “Aba” to “Gökçınar (Mehmed)” while Koçu was alive, has attracted the attention of more and more historians and researchers since the 1990s, as it goes beyond the official historical narrative and opens different windows.
The comprehensive material that Koçu compiled and edited for future volumes, which remained at the design stage, was revealed in its entirety after it was taken over by Kadir Has University in 2018. The archive, consisting of more than 40,000 documents, is a kind of “media archaeology laboratory” in terms of Koçu’s working methods and the ideas he gave about producing a multi-volume and multi-authored publication with limited resources in the second half of the 20th century. Drafts of the articles planned to be included in the volumes between “Gökdemir (Döndü)” and “Zürefa Street” articles and for which a list is available in the archive, early versions of some articles in the published volumes, independent texts and photographs, drawings, which suggest that Koçu compiled articles according to the material in some cases. A widely diverse group of documents, such as excerpts, details the complex and multi-layered process of the encyclopedia’s creation.
Source: www.technopat.net
