In the last two decades, after all Soviet ideological restrictions on scientific and cultural ties with Turkey fell, and Turkey itself was put in order in its archival affairs, Russian historians had the opportunity to work in Turkish archives.

Scientists who study the national histories of the Turkic peoples of the former Soviet Union are particularly active in conducting archival research in Turkey. Indeed, for them, as well as for the study of the Middle Ages in Eastern Europe in general, the Ottoman documents stored in Turkish archives are of great interest. However, mastering them is quite difficult, since the Turkish language, which is related and close to other Turkic languages, requires special language training to work with documents in it, and special difficulties arise when getting acquainted with its Ottoman version.

In 1928, Turkey abandoned the use of the Arabic alphabet for its language and switched to the Latin alphabet. The Arabic script was obviously inconvenient for the Turkic languages: it does not imply the obligatory representation of vowel sounds on the letter, which is explained by a peculiar pattern of their use in Arabic. The Turkic peoples, even in foreign words, usually try to separate consonants with vowels. Turkic texts written in Arabic script sometimes turned into some kind of puzzles that the reader had to be able to solve. Therefore, learning to read and write was not an easy task. This proved to be a common problem for all Turkic peoples, which led most of them to abandon the Arabic alphabet. The introduction of the Latin alphabet in Turkey simplified the spelling, making it phonetically more accurate, but it also revealed those discrepancies between the Turkic languages that were previously not so noticeable in writing. Now the phonetic features of each language are clearly marked.

In Turkey in the XX century, not only the font, alphabet, but also the language itself changed. The language reform that was carried out in the country involved replacing previously widely used Arabic and Persian words with words with Turkic roots. This replacement was very active, and the newspapers published lists of words that were proposed to be abandoned and replaced with new ones. Such a seemingly artificial (or even violent) measure was successful, which indicated that changes in the language were overdue and necessary. The language has been updated. In some ways, it came close to the Turkish vernacular and other Turkic languages, but the Ottoman language became incomprehensible to everyone. There was a linguistic, and therefore cultural, gap. For the modern Turkish youth, neither the great Ottoman poet Tevfik Fikret (who is as far away from us as A. Blok, for example), nor even the speeches of Kemal Ataturk have become incomprehensible in many ways. They should be translated into a modern language. A number of Turkish writers who published their first books in the 1940s and 1950s later translated them themselves into modern language.

The understanding of the Ottoman texts was problematic in Turkey itself. First of all, this also affected the previously difficult to understand formalized Ottoman language of official documents. It is not without reason that the old Russian Oriental studies required the Ottomans to know not only the modern Ottoman language, but also Persian and Arabic. A. K. Kazem-bek, one of the founders of Russian Turkology, arguing the need for such a trilingualism, wrote: "A Persian who thoroughly knows his own language, without even having any practical knowledge in Turkish... better understand the most difficult and intricate compositions in Turkish... than a natural Turk who knows neither Persian nor Arabic" (cit. by: [Ivanov, 2001, p. 97-102]). Modern Turkish became even more distant from the Ottoman language, and work in Turkish archives with Ottoman documents began to require special training even from the Turks themselves.

A number of historians of our North Caucasian republics have tried to use the help of their compatriots who have been living in Turkey for a long time. I think this is a possible option. Among the descendants of those who migrated to Turkey from the Caucasus in the XIX-XX centuries, there are those who not only studied at modern universities, but also previously graduated from madrasas. They are familiar with Arabic and Ottoman languages. However, it is not always they who undertake translations and identify the necessary documents.

In Turkey, elderly people often appear near archives and at international conferences attended by foreign scholars, offering their services in Latin transliteration of Ottoman texts. Obviously, you should not always refuse their services, as there are also real experts in the Ottoman language among them. You can't limit yourself to publishing translations and the Latin script version of the source. A clear facsimile of the Ottoman text must be present. Only in this case can the documents really be considered entered into scientific circulation.

Currently, direct contacts with Turkish archivists are also possible. I am pleased to mention, for example, the publication " The History of Central Asia in the Ottoman Documents: Vol. 1: Political and Diplomatic Relations "(Samarkand, 2011), prepared jointly by the UNESCO International Institute of Central Asian Studies and the Turkish Society of Archivists. The publication contains facsimiles, transliteration of documents, and a brief summary of them in Russian, English,and modern Turkish. The documents were processed and transliterated by Turkish specialists, while editing and translation into Russian were performed by Sh.Mustafayev and G. Mammadov, Turkologists who graduated from the Russian School of Oriental Studies.

Together with Turkish archivists and with the participation of the Istanbul Center for Social and Strategic Studies "Caucasian House" in Kabardino-Balkaria, a collection of Ottoman documents was prepared [History of the Adygs..., 2009]. He was preceded by an article by Mustafa Budak, Deputy Director General of the Bashkakanlyk Archive, in which he notes that in recent years there has been increased attention to documents about the relations of the Ottoman Empire with the Caucasus. In total, as the Turkish archivist states, from 1921 to 2005, 216 people worked in the archive on Caucasian issues, most of them were students who completed their course work and did not continue their research activities later.

This edition contains translations of documents and facsimile copies of their Ottoman texts. There is no transliteration of documents. According to the rules adopted for publishing Ottoman texts in Turkey, it is mandatory. This is natural, since Arabic graphics are unfamiliar to most Turkish readers. Scientific publications of Ottoman documents outside Turkey, in my opinion, may be limited to translations and facsimiles of the original, but the latter, I emphasize, is mandatory.

This form of publication (translation and Arabic-written original) has been used, for example, by the French researchers of A. Bennigsen's group since the 1960s, who excel in studying documents of the Ottoman archives on the history of Eastern Europe. Their work with Ottoman documents began with a seminar on Ottoman palaeography, in which the famous Turkish historian P. Baratav, then living in France, played a leading role.

A similar attempt to use international cooperation to study the Balkan region was made by the SIBAL Scientific Society in the 1980s. Seminars on Slavic, Latin and Ottoman palaeography were held. I was able to attend seminars on Ottoman palaeography held in Budapest and Sofia. In Budapest (or rather, in its suburb of Visegrad), there were working sessions in which all experts sat at the same desk, each reading the document they proposed and dwelling on those details that were not entirely clear to them; then they were collectively discussed until they were clearly interpreted. It was a very useful scientific school for all participants. Unfortunately, there was no such collaboration in Sofia. There were only reports of various publications of Ottoman sources carried out in different countries. Later, these meetings stopped, and no printed results, as far as I know, were summed up. French historians managed to create a whole school of Ottoman source studies on the basis of P. Baratava's seminar.

Our Kazan colleagues are most successful in this area in the Russian Federation. They introduced Russian-speaking readers to translations of the most famous publications of their French colleagues (see: [Eastern Europe..., 2009] and our review of this publication in No. 3 of the magazine "Vostok (Oriens)" for 2012), and also independently published a collection of Ottoman documents from the ancient repositories of Turkey concerning the Volga-Ural region (Kazan 2008), showing us a sample of how to work with Ottoman documents. I am pleased that this work was carried out in Kazan, where Russian Turkology was born at the time. It would be right if our Kazan colleagues could organize a scientific seminar on Ottoman paleography for turkologists from the former Soviet Union. This is not-

This is necessary, as Ottoman source studies are becoming a fashionable scientific discipline and we would like it to develop on a solid scientific foundation. More extensive scientific contacts with Turkish archivists are also possible at the present time - they have accumulated some scientific experience that should be used. No need to reinvent the wheel again.

list of literature

Eastern Europe of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times through the eyes of French researchers. Sbornik statei [Collection of articles]. I. A. Mustakimov, A. G. Sidikov; scientific ed. by I. V. Zaitsev, D. A. Mustafina; introduction, art. by V. V. Trspavlov. Kazan, 2009.

Documents on the history of the Volga-Ural region of the XVI-XIX centuries from the ancient storehouses of Turkey. Collection of documents / Comp. by I. A. Mustakimov. Kazan. 2008.

Ivanov S. M. Turkey through the eyes of Mirza Kazem-bek's students // Mirza Kazem-bek and Domestic Oriental Studies. Report and message of the scientific conference. Kazan. 2001. pp. 97-102.

The history of the Adygs in the documents of the Ottoman State Archive. Issue 1 / Ed. by B. Kh. Bgazhnokov, comp. by A.V. Kushkhabisv. Nalchik, 2009.

Istoriya Tsentralnoi Azii v osmanskikh dokumentov [History of Central Asia in the Ottoman Documents], Vol. 1: Politicheskie i diplomaticheskie otnosheniya I Nauch. red.: Sh. Mustafasv, M. Serii; obr. i translit. dokl.: K. Gurulkan, M. Bilgin, N. Pakirdag; per. na rus. yaz. G. Mamsdova; per. in English by A. Efsndisva. Samarkand, 2011.

Candidate of Historical Sciences, Leading Researcher of the Institute of Information Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences S. F. ORESHKOVA

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