The Gazi Husrev-Beg Library, which has a history of 488 years, contains more than 10 000 manuscripts in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.
The Gazi Husrev-Beg Madrasah and Library, built in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1537 by Gazi Husrev-Beg, the grandson of Sultan Bayezid II, one of the Ottoman sultans, is the oldest book depository in the Balkans.
The historical library was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2018. The library’s collection contains manuscripts in the fields of Islamic and natural sciences, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and medicine.
The library’s collection contains approximately 100,000 works, 10,000 of which are manuscripts. In addition, the library contains between 9,000 and 10 000 documents in Turkish, 21 000 books written in Eastern languages, and more than 30 000 books written in European languages.
Hamza Lavić, Head of Special Collections at the Gazi Husrev-Beg Library, reported that manuscripts constitute a significant portion of the collection.
Lavić noted that the library also contains archives dating back to the establishment of the Islamic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1882.
“This archive is a very important source for studying the history of not only the Islamic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina but also the region’s institutions as a whole over the past 150 years. The Ottoman archive contains approximately 20 000 documents dating from 1463 to 1878,” he said.
According to the coordinator, an important part of the Ottoman archives consists of 800 constituent documents. “Ottoman founding documents made a significant contribution to the social and urban development of Bosnian cities. Each such document is like a city’s birth certificate,” Lavic noted.
The library also holds a work containing commentaries on the book “The Canon of Medicine” by the great Islamic scholar Ibn Sina, he added.
