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Did Ottoman Calligraphers Really Bury Their Pens?

Writer: Seda Sürel
Seda Sürel
3 days ago
9 min read
Watercolor illustration of 18th-century Ottoman calligraphers placing reed pens and inkpots into a wooden coffin in Istanbul, depicting a legend about resistance to İbrahim Müteferrika’s printing press in 1727.
An imagined scene from a story told about Ottoman calligraphers in 1727, who reportedly placed their pens and inkwells in a coffin to protest İbrahim Müteferrika’s printing press. No contemporary evidence of the procession has been found.

For readers in a hurry: a well-known Turkish story says that when İbrahim Müteferrika opened the first Ottoman Turkish printing press in 1727, the calligraphers of Istanbul put their pens in a coffin and carried it in a funeral procession. I could not find an eighteenth-century source for it. The documented history of the press is about proofreaders, print runs and unsold stock. Turkish even has a suffix for stories like this one.


A friend of mine works on artificial intelligence projects and writes about AI. Whenever she shares her thinking on it, some of the replies are sharp. Recently she told me about one of the harsher messages she had received.


I did what a history graduate does when a friend is upset. I told her a story from 1727.



The story as it is usually told


In the 1720s Istanbul was living through what historians later called the Lale Devri, the Tulip Era, under Sultan Ahmed III and his grand vizier Nevşehirli Damad İbrahim Paşa.


It was a period of gardens, poetry and new pavilions along the Bosphorus, and of growing curiosity about Europe. (I wrote about the tulips themselves, and their Dutch cousins, in my post on the Ottoman Tulip Era.)


In 1726 İbrahim Müteferrika, a convert to Islam who served at court, presented a proposal for a press printing in Arabic letters. Printed books, he argued, would be cheaper, more numerous, more accurate and longer lasting, and provincial towns could have libraries of their own. He also made a commercial case. European printers were already producing Arabic-script books for Muslim buyers, and he saw no reason to leave that trade to foreign rulers.


In July 1727 he received permission, backed by the sultan's order and a fetva from the Şeyhülislam Yenişehirli Abdullah Efendi. The permission named dictionaries, history, medicine, astronomy, geography and the sciences, the same fields Müteferrika had listed in his proposal. Books of Islamic law, Qur'anic commentary, hadith and theology were left out. Four scholars were appointed to proofread the books, and sixteen more wrote endorsements.


This is where the coffin enters. According to the story, the hattats (calligraphers) and müstensihs (professional copyists) of Istanbul feared for their livelihoods. They placed their reed pens and inkwells, the divits and hokkas of their trade, inside a tabut, a coffin, and carried it in procession to the Bâbıâli, the seat of government. To calm them, religious books were left in their hands.


I like this story. A coffin full of pens is a striking image, and the ending is gentle: the calligraphers make their point, the state listens, the Qur'an stays handwritten and the dictionaries go to the press.


Then I sat down to write about it and went looking for the coffin.



Then I went looking for the coffin


No Ottoman chronicle or archival document I could trace mentions it. The historians who have worked with the letters of European diplomats in Istanbul do not cite a funeral for pens either.


The oldest printed version I found is a 1978 article in Vakıflar Dergisi, the journal of Türkiye's General Directorate of Foundations. The article has no footnotes, and an older version may well exist that I could not reach. In this telling, the calligraphers put their pens and writing tools in a coffin, and the Turkish speaks of their attempts to organize a funeral procession, cenaze alayı tertip etmek teşebbüsleri. This caused, the author writes, biraz patırtı ve birçok dedikodu, "a little commotion and a great deal of gossip," and afterwards they calmed down.


By 2015, when the story appeared in an English-language newspaper in Türkiye, the attempt had become a protest march all the way to the Bâbıâli. That article gives no source either. It introduces the story with one careful Turkish word: anlatılır, "it is told."


The scholarly literature is more cautious still. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi entry on printing looks at the simpler claim, that copyists opposed the press, and calls it tahmine dayalı bir yakıştırma, an attribution based on guesswork. A related story comes from the eighteenth century itself. The French officer Baron de Tott claimed that 6,000 copyists joined the Patrona Halil revolt of 1730 and destroyed the press.


Modern historians reject this, and the press kept printing until 1742.


The ending of the coffin story raises another question. It always explains a rule: this is why religious books stayed with the calligraphers. The exclusion is documented. Its reason is not. The 1727 order gives none, and Müteferrika had already promised in his 1726 proposal that he would not print religious books. Some historians point to respect for sacred texts and the interests of copyists; others point to low demand for books. A story that grows up around a known fact to explain it is a familiar pattern; folklorists call it an aetiological tale.


The numbers around the legend have shifted too. You may read that 90,000 copyists worked in Istanbul. The figure goes back to the Italian count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, writing in 1732, and it changes depending on who quotes him: 80,000 or 90,000, across the empire or inside Istanbul alone. The TDV encyclopedia treats the Istanbul version as an error. That would be a lot of calligraphers for one city.



Turkish has a suffix for this


When Turks retell something they did not see, the verb often changes shape:


Hattatlar kalemlerini bir tabuta koymuşlar. The calligraphers, so the story goes, put their pens in a coffin.


That -mış is the suffix of fairy tales, which open with Bir varmış, bir yokmuş, "Once there was, once there wasn't." It marks something the speaker heard from others or worked out from evidence. It can also carry surprise at something just noticed: Ne kadar büyümüşsün! "Look how much you've grown!"


The plain past -dı presents an event as known. History books use it all the time for events no living person witnessed: İstanbul 1453'te fethedildi, "Istanbul was conquered in 1453." The choice between the two suffixes shows how the speaker stands toward the information. For a story whose source nobody has found, -mış is the natural choice.


Anlatılır, the passive of anlatmak, goes one step further and leaves the story without any teller at all. (If you are curious how these suffixes attach to a verb, my guide to Turkish structure and suffixes walks through it.)



What the press actually faced


The first title, the Vankulu Lügatı, an Arabic–Turkish dictionary, came out in 1729 with Müteferrika's proposal printed at the front. Over the next thirteen years the press produced around 17 titles, usually in runs of about 500 copies. When Müteferrika died, around 1747, roughly 70 percent of the stock had sold, and his estate inventory still listed 2,981 unsold books. Printed books were expensive, and Istanbul already had a working manuscript market with skilled copyists and established booksellers. For many buyers, a well-written manuscript remained the better object.


Istanbul already had printing presses by then. Sephardic Jewish printers were working in Istanbul in the 1490s, and Armenian and Greek presses followed in 1567 and 1627.


The often-repeated "bans" on printing by Bayezid II and Selim I have been traced by the historian Kathryn Schwartz to a French writer of 1584, André Thevet, who offered no evidence. The only sultanic decrees on print she found were permissions.



Scribes who did complain


The Ottoman coffin is probably a legend, but in Europe the worry left written traces.


Around 1473 or 1474, Filippo de Strata, a Benedictine monk and scribe on the island of Murano near Venice, asked the Doge to ban printing altogether. He saw printers as uneducated men producing careless books for profit. In the English translation of his address, his verdict on writing reads: "She is a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print."


In 1492 the German abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote De laude scriptorum, "In Praise of Scribes," arguing that copying by hand demanded more diligence and was more devout work than printing. Two years later the book was printed in Mainz, the city where Gutenberg had worked.



Back to my friend


The Müteferrika press printed a dictionary and a shelf of histories and maps, and left a room full of unsold books. The calligraphers kept working. By the nineteenth century, according to a recent study, scribes and calligraphers were working inside the Imperial Press, helping printed books keep the look of handwritten ones.


What draws me to history is the perspective it gives. I know that for many people history feels bitmiş gitmiş, finished and gone, and I understand that feeling. But when I see an argument about a new technology somewhere online, it means something to me to know that people had a very similar argument centuries ago. Looking at today's quarrel with that depth behind it changes how I see it.


The same is true when you learn a language. If you want to learn Turkish, it helps to know how the people who spoke it reacted to what changed around them. Those reactions shaped the culture, and the language still carries their traces.


As for me, I know there is no fighting a river that is already flowing. Whether history always took the best possible road is another question. More often, I think, it took the shortest one. Nature and people both look for the easier path, and neither likes to spend energy it does not have to. That is how we arrived here, with the good and the bad together, and we cannot simply turn back. What matters is being able to take the good parts of what happens and leave the bad ones behind.


I get a fair amount of criticism myself because I use AI to produce the watercolor images on my website. For me, having an image drawn the way it appears in my mind, for this exact piece, is far more creative than picking something random. It takes effort and thought. For some people it is completely unacceptable. If they could, they would put AI in a coffin.


Anyone curious about how I think about this and about life in general, can read the self-interview I did with AI.


The same question comes up in my teaching. I recommended that one of my students talk with AI every day for speaking practice, to take some of the stress out of speaking. Talking to a person makes this student anxious, and he tenses up. He is glad AI helped him past that psychological threshold, but he is not happy that it is software.


If he brings it into his life without pushing aside real effort and study, or teachers like me, his progress will speed up. I am less sure what depending on it alone would mean.


In the end, it is hard to protect our creativity, our skills and our focus. New technologies tire us and frighten us, and sometimes even the ease they bring feels like a loss. I think we need to find our way with an eye on history, and without seeing everything in black and white. Learning Turkish is no different.


Perhaps one day I, as a Turkish teacher, will be replaced, just like those calligraphers in the story. Who knows. As the saying goes, que sera, sera.


Vocabulary


matbaa – printing press, printing house

basmak – to print (also to press, to step on)

hattat – calligrapher

müstensih – copyist of manuscripts

divit – a portable pen case with an attached inkwell

hokka – inkwell

tabut – coffin

cenaze alayı – funeral procession

dedikodu – gossip

anlatılır – "it is told" (passive of anlatmak, to tell)



Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)


Q: Did Ottoman calligraphers really hold a coffin protest against the printing press?

A: No eighteenth-century source for it has been found. The oldest printed version I could find is a 1978 article without footnotes, which describes an attempted funeral procession that caused gossip and then faded. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi treats even the milder claim of copyist opposition as guesswork.


Q: Why were religious books excluded from the Müteferrika press?

A: The exclusion is documented, but the 1727 order gives no reason. Müteferrika had already promised not to print religious books in his proposal. Some historians point to respect for sacred texts and the interests of copyists, others to low demand.


Q: Was the Müteferrika press the first printing press in the Ottoman Empire?

A: It was the first officially authorized, Muslim-run press printing Ottoman Turkish in Arabic letters. Jewish printers had been working in Istanbul since the 1490s, and Armenian and Greek presses since 1567 and 1627.


Q: What does -mış mean in Turkish?

A: It is a past suffix used for information the speaker heard from others or inferred, for storytelling, and for surprise at something just noticed. Koymuşlar can mean "they reportedly put" or "it turns out they put," while koydular presents the event as known.



Sources



2 Comments

JF Bierlein
2 days ago

I have a label for you: "Treasure."  

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seda
2 days ago
Replying to

Teşekkür ederim.

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