BAŞBAKANLIK OTTOMAN ARCHIVES in Istanbul

As an imperial centralised state, the bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire produced a vast amount of state documents, most of which are now located in the Ottoman Archives. The first state documents was moved to the Imperial Treasury and the Inner Court of the Topkapı Palace. It was not until 1845 that any attempt was made to establish what we consider in the modern sense s state archive, when he cataloguing of these documents was begun;

The Hazine-i Evrak, "treasury of papers" was set up to organise and catalogue these state documents, and a separate building was built to house them. During the Republican period, the Hazine-i Evrak, the Ottoman Archives, was put under the administration of the Prime Minister's office under the direct supervision of the director of the General State Archives. The process of cataloguing this immense collection of state documents continues today by a large number of professionally trained staff of experts. The catalogued documents are accessible to modern scholars, foreign and domestic.