Supervised by: Dr. Christiane Czygan and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Victoria Holbrook
Duration: Since 2026
For millennia, poetry was one of the most important modes of communication. Long before Islam, verse was the most frequent mode for narrative as well as cuneiform texts, funerary inscriptions, monumental epigraphy, and many other media.
The Ottomans consciously connected to this long tradition. In the Ottoman world, poetry was not an ornament added to political, social, or scholarly life from the outside. It was one of the main ways in which life was articulated. Most Ottomans wrote poetry. A volume of one’s collected poems could serve as a kind of calling card declaring one’s membership in elites. Verse was used in a wide range of genres, for philosophy, historiography, jurisprudence, endowment registers, correspondence, inscriptions, scholarly writing, and song. Thousands of couplets formed story and epic which belonged to the canon of knowledge and learning, Dīvān collections assembled individual creations, numerous teẕkires presented poet biographies, and ʿāşıḳs carried epics to the most remote corners of the Ottoman Empire.
It functioned as a medium of communication, representation, knowledge, memory, edifice, entertainment, and social distinction. For this reason, Ottoman poetry is a key to understanding Ottoman textuality, intellectual culture, and social communication more broadly. While the current focus is on Islamic and Turkophone poetry, the Ottoman Empire was home to a wide range of non-Islamic and non-Turkophone poetic traditions, and the research priority remains open to their inclusion.
Ottoman Poetry at the Orient-Institut Istanbul aims, therefore, to open a shared intellectual space in which philology, history, philosophy, linguistics, manuscript studies, epigraphy, musicology, digital humanities, and literary studies can meet.