A Life in Pursuit of Manuscripts Nuri Arlasez

This book-album is published on the 25th year of the death of Nuri Arlasez, the “Custodian of cultural heritage works”, who donated hundreds of manuscripts, artworks, and photographs of inestimable artistic and documentary value to Süleymaniye Library, Topkapı Palace Museum, and IRCICA. Selections from the collections, showcased at the exhibition held at Rami Library in September 2025 and presented in the book together with informative texts, consist of 60 manuscripts from a total of 329; Sultan Abdulhamid II’s collection of 30 manuscript translations of detective novels; 14 out of Arlasez’s collection of 350 calligraphy plates; and from IRCICA archive, letters from his correspondence with the historian Arnold Toynbee and 45 out of the 11065 photographs of Istanbul taken by Arlasez. While browsing through the rare works of cultural heritage and traditional arts, the reader will also get to know an Istanbul gentleman in the 20th-century who devoted his life to collecting these works to entrust them to the cultural institutions where they would be preserved forever.