A Life In Pursuit of Manuscripts: Nuri Arlasez

The ‘Custodian of Cultural Artefacts,’ who donated his collection of hundreds of priceless manuscripts, works of art, and photographs to the Süleymaniye Library, Topkapı Palace Museum, and IRCICA This album-book, published on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Nuri Arlasez's death, presents selected examples from the collections and introductory texts about them.

Sixty of the 329 various manuscripts in the manuscript collection; Sultan Abdülhamid II's collection of 30 handwritten detective novel translations; 14 works from Arlasez's collection of 350 calligraphy panels; 45 of the 11,065 photographs of Istanbul taken by the historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee, from the IRCICA archive, are included in this book and were exhibited at the Rami Library in September 2025. While encountering rare works from cultural heritage and traditional arts, readers will also be introduced to a 20th-century Istanbul gentleman who dedicated his life to collecting these works and entrusting them to cultural institutions where they could be preserved for posterity.