Originally posted by JacKatMtn
I am not up to date on the Ottoman historical archives, but it appears that Turkey is going to make the archive available for research.
Is this significant? Will this help the historical record?
Yes -- but it's political history that it will impact... and could potentially spark a number of border disputes.
The Ottoman Empire existed for about 600 years, ending in 1920 (
en.wikipedia.org... ). Because it was a stable government,
it had a long chain of records of maps and diplomatic reports and letters between the Beys (rulers) and other countries. It also has legal and civic
records of those countries which got swallowed up by the Ottoman Empire itself.
So we may see some border disputes come out of this. Everyone's known the records are there, but they haven't really been available to be read and
discussed.