Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Topographic Mapping of the Balkans

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse the nineteenth-century Ottoman cartographic activities and map production in the European parts of their empire. Already weakened by centuries of wars, the Ottoman Empire, in its late phase of territorial regression, had to find a way to compensate the absence of its own mapping activities. That especially came to the fore when the interest of the Ottoman administration in the mapping of the European part of its empire was stimulated by the requirements of its military operations during the Russo-Turkish Wars, as well as by the consequent geopolitical changes that occurred with the independence of certain parts of the empire (Greece, Wallachia and Moldavia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria). The solution was found in translating European, mostly Austrian and Russian, topographic maps into the Ottoman Turkish language. This practice resulted in the production of topographic maps that met the military needs of the Ottoman army, but also in a gradual transfer of the Western science and cartographic practice to the Ottoman culture.

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