Manuscript Collection of Travnik Cantonal Archive

Abstract

The collection of manuscripts of Cantonal Archive in Travnik represents a significant source for studying of cultural heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina written in oriental languages. It contains manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian languages covering sciences that had been studied in the Ottoman Empire at the time when Bosnia and Herzegovina was under its rule. It is particularly important that the collection includes a couple of works by Bosnian authors who were also writing in oriental languages. In addition to these manuscripts, several other works are worth mentioning as they reveal what kinds of activities Bosniaks of the time were engaged in. Information on Bosnian copyists and marginal notes are extremely useful for research and studying of this aspect of cultural heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina as such notes include data on Bosnian owners or founders, as well as other interesting notes relating to Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collection includes 121 codices of 224 works. 172 are in Arabic, 45 in Turkish, 3 in Persian, 1 in Arabic-Turkish-Persian, 1 in Arabic-Persian, and 2 in Persian-Turkish languages. Among these manuscripts, there are works on Qur’an science disciplines, hadits and hadit sciences, Islamic law (fikh), Islamic dogmatics, Islamic prayers of supplication – duas, ethics, and homiletics. Islamic mysticism, logic, disputation, grammar/morphology, grammar/syntax, lexicography, stylistics and metrics, literature, mathematics, astronomy, epistolography, and archives.