The ANAMED Library has special collections donated to Koç University by distinguished professors. These special collections are important part of the Library collection with more than 13.000 books, journals and archive materials on Ancient, Turkish, Central Asia, Ottoman, Balkan History, Islamic Art and History, Anatolian Archeology, Anatolian and Nomad Culture, Byzantine Art and Architecture, Numismatics and Hittitology. Hatice-Gonnet Bağana and Josephine Powell collections were digitized by Koç University Suna Kıraç Library and made available to researchers as open access in the digital collections archive platform.
Steven Runciman
Steven Runciman (1903–2000) is considered to be one of the most prominent historians of the crusades and “the great authority of Byzantine studies” in the words of Paul Magdalino. The Scottish historian’s three volume A History of the Crusades, published between 1951 and 1954, is still one of the primary reference books for the field. Among his many published works are the Eastern Schism(1955), The Sicilian Vespers(1958), The Fall of Constantinople: 1453 (1965), and The Last Byzantine Renaissance(1970). For more information on his life and works, see this Guardian obituary.
The Sir Steven Runciman Collection is one of the foundation stones of the ANAMED Library collection, thanks to the generous donation of St. Andrews University. Comprised of approximately 3,000 publications in the disciplines of art, archaeology, and architecture, the collection covers the Seljuk, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods.
Jacques Lefort
Jacques Lefort (1939–2014), the late Directeur d’Études Émérite à l’École Pratique des Hautes études (IVe section), was a leading expert in Byzantine studies and a very good friend of Hatice Gonnet-Bağana. Following her example, he donated his valuable collection to the ANAMED Library just before his death in 2014. The Jacques Lefort collection consists of 636 titles in Byzantine art and history.
Şinasi Tekin
Şinasi Tekin (1933–2004) was the leading expert of Turcology and one of the founding figures of Turkish Studies in North America. After receiving his PhD from Hamburg University, he worked in Erzurum Atatürk University. In 1965 he became a faculty member at Harvard University and served as a professor there until the end of his life in 2004. He founded and for many years edited the Turkish Studies Journal. Tekin was an expert of Uighur Turkish and Buddhist culture, and was one of the most established teachers of Ottoman Turkish, having taught the language for decades to many prominent Ottomanists. Together with his wife, Professor Gönül Alpay Tekin, and Selim Sırrı Kuru, and with the institutional partnership of Koç University, Harvard University, and Uludağ University, he founded Harvard-Koç Universities’ Ottoman Summer School in Cunda in 1996, an institution still serving the Ottoman Studies community.
The Şinasi Tekin Collection, acquired by the Suna Kıraç Library in mid-2000s, consists of around 1800 titles on Turkish, Ottoman, and Central Asian history and languages.
Ömer Diler
Ömer Diler (1945–2005) was an important Turkish numismatist specializing in Islamic coins. Trained as a chemical engineer, he developed an interest in numismatics, resulting in his membership in Turkish and American numismatic societies and a prolific publishing career. His posthumous book on the Ilkhanate coinage is considered to be the authoritative work in the field. Diler’s collection was acquired by the ANAMED Library with thanks to a 2009 grant from the Getty Foundation’s Art History Research Center.
Prof. Slobodan ĆurčiĆ
Slobodan Ćurčić is an Emeritus Professor at Princeton University. He holds a PhD from New York University, and is a renowned expert on late antique and Byzantine art and architecture. He led many archaeological excavations in former Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus. He is the author of numerous books and articles. His many books include Art and Architecture in the Balkans: An Annotated Bibliography (1984), The Twilight of Byzantium (with co-editor D. Mouriki, 1991), and Middle Byzantine Architecture on Cyprus: Provincial or Regional (2000).
Professor Ćurčić donated to the ANAMED Library a collection of 276 books that consists mostly of works on Byzantine art and architecture.
A. Muhibbe Darga
Muhibbe Darga is one of the pioneers of Anatolian archaeology. With a PhD from İstanbul University, she participated in and directed many excavations in Anatolia and worked in the same university for a long time. She taught and researched on Assyrian and Hittite civilizations and languages. She is the author of many books, including Eski Anadolu’da Kadın(Women in Ancient Anatolia, 1976), Hitit Mimarlığı, Yapı Sanatı: Arkeolojik ve Filolojik Veriler(Hittite Architecture, Arts of Construction: Archaeological and Philological Findings, 1985), and Hitit Sanatı (Art of the Hittites, 1992).
The Muhibbe Darga Collection consists of 580 works on Hittitology and other ancient civilizations of Anatolia, helping position Koç University to become a leading center for research in Hittitology.
Hatice Gonnet-Bağana
Archaeologist Hatice Gonnet-Bağana is a noted Hititologist who has studied and taught in France, worked and directed excavations in Anatolia, and taken part in the activities of UNESCO for the conservation of archaeological sites in Türkiye. Gonnet-Bağana’s generous donation of her archives and books to the ANAMED Library in 2014 positioned Koç University to become a leading center for research in Hittitology.
The collection consists of 206 publications. Additionally, the most important part of the collection is the archival documents, including Gonnet-Bağana’s correspondence with institutes of learning and other leading scholars (including J. David Hawkins, Paolo Emilio Pecorella, Halime Hüryılmaz, Marie-Louise Vollenweider, Andreas Müller-Karpe, Helmuth Bossert, Paul Garelli, Jamil Armand, Mustafa Büke, and others), as well as photographs of excavation sites taken together with the famous photographer Ara Güler. This archival collection has been digitized by the Koç University Suna Kıraç Library and is accessible to the public. For more details on the collection and Hatice Gonnet-Bağana herself, please see Koç University Archives Specialist Senem Acar’s blogpost.
Dr. Esin Atıl
Esin Atil received her PhD from the University of Michigan and is a leading scholar of Islamic Art, author of many books and articles, and curator of numerous exhibitions. She served as the Curator of Islamic Art and Historian of Islamic Art in the Smithsonian Institution for many years. Her many books include the seminal work on Ottoman festivals, Levni and the Surname: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Festival(1999). The Esin Atıl Collection, one of the core collections of the ANAMED Library, comprises more than 2,000 books and journals and 18,000 slides related to Islamic art history and history.
Josephine Powell
The American photographer and collector Josephine Powell (1919–2007) was one of the last great travelers in Anatolia. Born in New York City, she earned a bachelor of arts from Cornell University in 1941 and went on to live in Tazmania, Germany, and Italy, before moving to Istanbul in 1974. When she was commissioned to write a book on kilims, she discovered that not much research had been done on them. She travelled in Anatolia to do the research herself. In the 1970s and 1980s, she visited nomads and villagers of Anatolia, photographing their daily activities and handicrafts. During these years, Powell became more and more fascinated by the lives of rural women and by their artful weaving. She collected an amazing archive of photographs and field notes on flat-woven textiles made by nomadic, semi-nomadic, and settled weavers. In the mid-1980s, Powell and others set up the DOBAG project (Doğal Boya Araştırma ve Geliştirme Projesi), which aims to revive the use of natural dyes among villagers in western Türkiye. Powell was also involved in the founding of an ethnographic section of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul. In 2002, she donated her archive of architectural photographs to Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library. Collections of her photographs and ethnographic objects are held by the British Museum, Harvard University, the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), and the Wereldmuseum (Rotterdam).
Just three months before her death in 2007, she donated her collection, which is one of the richest in its field, to the Vehbi Koç Foundation. The collection comprises over 33,000 field notes, slides, negatives, photographs, and books on Anatolian villages and the lives and cultures of nomads. The part of the collection consisting of flat-weaves such as kilims, sacks, tents, and weaving and agricultural implements is housed in the VKF Sadberk Hanım Museum. The archive of 28,000 slides has been digitized by the Koç University Suna Kıraç Library. The donated books and journals constitute a special collection of 1500 titles, covering a wide array of topics on Anatolian history.
In 2011 ANAMED organized an exhibit and published an accompanying book based on Josephine Powell’s photographs that were curated and edited by Kimberly Hart.
Eunice Dauterman Maguire & Henry Maguire
One of the most important developments at the ANAMED Library was the generous donation of books on Byzantine art and architecture made in 2013 by noted Byzantine art historians Eunice Dauterman Maguire and Henry Maguire. Eunice Dauterman Maguire, Curator of the Archaeological Collection and Senior Lecturer in Art History at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Weavings from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Egypt (1999) and, with Henry Maguire, the coauthor of Art and Holy Powers in the Early Christian House (1989). Henry Maguire, Professor Emeritus in the History of Art Department of Johns Hopkins University, and a noted expert on Byzantine and medieval art, was the Director of Studies in the Byzantine Studies Program at Dumbarton Oaks (1991–1996). He is the author of Art and Eloquence in Byzantium (1981) and The Icons of Their Bodies: Saints and Their Images in Byzantium(1996).
The Eunice Dauterman Maguire & Henry Maguire Collection consists of approximately 1,500 volumes of 20th-century to the present hardbacks, paperbacks, and periodicals pertaining to Byzantine art, culture, and related topics. It includes a substantive collection of volumes and reports published by the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, Washington D.C., and other academic institutions and museums with programs and holdings in Byzantine art and studies.
Anthony Bryer
Anthony Bryer (1937-2016), late Emeritus Professor of Byzantine history at Birmingham University, wrote his doctorate thesis on The Empire of Trebizond (1204-1461) at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He held fellowships at Athens University, Dumbarton Oaks and Merton College, Oxford. He was the founder and long-serving first director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham (1976 – 1994). In 1975, he also established “Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies”, now a leading journal in the field. His publications included “The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos”, “Peoples and settlement in Anatolia and the Caucasus, 800-1900”, “The post-Byzantine monuments of the Pontos: a source book” and several articles. Bryer acted as chairman of the British committee of the International Association of Byzantine Studies (1989-95) and served as director at British Institute at Ankara (1996-2000).
Anthony Bryer, one of the doyens of research on Anatolian Civilizations, donated to the ANAMED Library of Koç University just before his death in late 2016, a collection of 15 journals and book series, including Eastern Churches Review, Byzantinoslavica: International Journal of Byzantine Studies, Byzantion, Revue Internationale des Etudes Byzantines, Petits Propos Culinaires: Essays and Notes to do with Food, Cookery and Cookery Books, Revues des Études Byzantines, Sobornost, Transaction of Royal Historical Society, composed of approximately 500 volumes, which further enriches the library, especially in the area of Byzantine Studies.
For our librarians’ take on the collection and Anthony Bryer himself, please see ANAMED Library Branch Librarian Naz Özkan and NIT Library Branch Librarian İrem Ünal’s blogposts (in Turkish).
Melek Delilbaşı
After graduating from from Ankara University in 1968, Melek Delilbaşı conducted her doctoral studies at the University of Thessaloniki between 1970-1972. Completing her doctoral thesis in 1973 at Ankara University, she had a scholarship at the Harvard Byzantinology Institute (Dumbarton Oaks) in Washington, DC from 1987 to 1988. In this year, she became a professor at Ankara University Faculty of Languages, History and Geography. Professor Delilbaşı chaired Ankara University’s department of History from 1989 to 1994; and department of Modern Greek Language and Literature from 1990 to 2005. She also chaired Ankara University’s Department of History during 1989 – 1994 and Department of Modern Greek Language and Literature from 1990 to 2005. She gave lectures on “Byzantine-Ottoman History” at Middle East Technical University. Delilbaşı published lots of articles and translations about Early Ottoman history, late Byzantine history, the Ottoman cadastral record books in journals such as Belleten, Turkish Review Quarterly Digest, Atatürk Kültür Dil ve Tarih Yüksek Kurumu Bülteni, Association Internationale d’Ètudes du Sud-Est Européen Bulletin, Türk Tarih Kurumu Belgeler Dergisi, Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi. She also served as a directore at Ottoman History Research & Application Centre (OTAM) from 2005 to 2009. Currently, she was the vice-president of Association Internationale d’Etudes du Sud-Est Européen (AIESEE) and the president of the Turkish National Committee for Byzantine Studies.
Melek Delilbaşı donated her personal collection of 848 volumes in Greek, English, Turkish and some more in other languages to the ANAMED Library in late 2018. She generously contributed to the process of collection development of ANAMED Library, especially in the fields of late Byzantine history, Balkan history, early Ottoman history, and history of modern Greece.