Istanbul Encyclopedia now available online

ISTANBUL

The printed volumes of Reşad Ekrem Koçu’s “Istanbul Encyclopedia” and thousands of related archival sources have been digitized and are now online.

The website, istanbulansiklopedisi.org, offers access to the printed volumes of Koçu’s Istanbul Encyclopedia and thousands of related documents. Bringing together over 40,000 digitized documents, this online platform incorporates published encyclopedia articles and a body of archival material that forms the basis for subsequent volumes. It provides an opportunity to trace and explore the visual and textual connections between various sources.

The website is launched as an output of the Koçu and Istanbul Encyclopedia Archive project, following the exhibition “No Further Records” and an e-publication of the same title. Blending common facts with unusual accounts, the Istanbul Encyclopedia — and the relevance of the knowledge it entails — is worthy of further scrutiny.

The Istanbul Encyclopedia is a comprehensive work to which historian and novelist Koçu (1905-1975) devoted most of his life, yet never completed. Koçu set out to create, in his own words, the “grand register” of Istanbul in 1944 and continued his extensive study throughout his life. Originally planned to be published in 24 volumes, the encyclopedia’s first 11 volumes up to the letter G were printed intermittently until 1973.

From streets to architectural structures, from important or common people and the customs of the city to historical events and urban legends, numerous subjects were recorded through story-like narratives and illustrations. A collaborative work of esteemed historians, literary scholars, academics, and artists of the period, the Istanbul Encyclopedia presents a unique blend of the tezkire [biographical anthology] tradition and Western encyclopedism. It is not merely a reference source, a compilation of testimonies, or a massive effort to include everything about Istanbul, but also an extraordinary work that constructs a unique image or idea of the city.

Witnessing the transformation of Istanbul from the capital of the Ottoman Empire into a province of the Republic of Turkey, Koçu depicted the city with the everyday and mundane, registering all sorts of topics from accidents and murders to tourists, waiters, coffeehouses, and hammams. The encyclopedia was published from the article “Aba” to “Gökçınar [Mehmed]” during Koçu’s lifetime and has become increasingly popular among historians and researchers from the 1990s onwards, as it offers different perspectives beyond official historical narratives.

The extensive material that Koçu compiled, edited, and drafted for future volumes came to light when the archive was acquired by Kadir Has University in 2018. Comprising over 40,000 documents, the archive is a kind of “media archeology laboratory” considering the insight it provides into Koçu’s working methods and the production of a multi-volume and multi-authored publication with limited means in the second half of the 20th century.

A diverse range of sources — including photographs, illustrations, excerpts, drafts of articles planned to be featured in volumes G-Z, early versions of select articles in printed volumes and independent texts suggesting that Koçu had also compiled articles based on the material — details the complex and multi-layered process of the encyclopedia’s formation.