Chasing Documents at the Ottoman Archive: An Imperial Circumcision Festival Under Scrutiny

Abstract

In 1720, the Ottoman court staged a grand public circumcision in Istanbul, with festivities lasting for three weeks. Although this imperial festival, celebrated in two separate sites, has been attracting the interest of Ottoman scholars for five decades, previous researchers have only accessed the event through narrative and pictorial sources, which provide information solely on the morphology of the festival and some of its rites. Recently, however, comprehensive research in the Ottoman archives has unearthed the most extensive archival source concerning an Ottoman festival that historians have ever discovered. Composed of thousands of documents of different types, the registers and individual records studied by the present author strikingly illuminate the social, material and financial aspects of the festival. In addition, they illustrate the organisational plan and the day-to-day coordination by which the Ottoman bureaucracy retained control of this event. While the discovery presented here demonstrates the great potential of archival research for the study of Ottoman festivals, at the same time it will be useful to scholars working on other sub-fields of Ottoman studies—to say nothing of historians working on celebrations in other cultural contexts. This article discusses the type, content and format of the documents recording the 1720 festival, while also elucidating their discovery process at the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives in Istanbul.