ABSTRACT
Viewing the map of Central and Eastern Europe in 1910 through the lens of Ottoman Turkish (هجيلنماثع ʿOsmānlıca) reveals a number of interesting features, particularly in terms of changes from older forms of place names, but especially a consideration how the focus of this map differs from the sorts of representations found in late Ottoman atlases and maps. The Ottoman Empire had a long and rich tradition of cartography, with a number of scholars engaging in that pursuit, most famously the sixteenth-century geographer Piri Reis. However, it was not until the later part of the nineteenth century that maps became more widely available for viewing by Ottoman subjects, largely due to the explosion of print culture in the second half of that century and the concurrent increase in access to education. During this period, the Ottomans embraced the sort of cartography found in European atlases, a process that had begun in the late eighteenth century. Geographies, atlases, and maps tended to be published for educational purposes, focusing on the Sublime State itself and its setting within the world, adding to the corpus of texts and symbols intended to instill loyalty towards the Ottoman Empire and the sultan. There were, of course, maps with many of these Ottoman atlases, such as the incredibly detailed textual descriptions and provincial maps of Memālik-i ʿOsmānīye Ceb Aṭlası (Pocket Atlas of the Ottoman Realms, 1323 AH/1905 CE). However, there were also plenty of publications that saw no need to represent the Ottoman Empire cartographically, presenting instead a written map with place names and descriptions, such as Coğrāfyā-yı Mufaṣṣal-ı Memālik-i Devlet-i ʿOsmānīye (The Comprehensive Geography of the Realms of the Ottoman State, 1304 AH/1887 CE). This was more in keeping with earlier Ottoman and Islamic methods of geographic literature, where text was an essential part of displaying and explaining the world (for a full discussion of changes in Ottoman cartography, see Fortna 2002: 165–201). In the majority of cases, visual or written, the geography of the Ottoman Empire itself was the primary concern of geographers and cartographers.
