Conference: Once, We Were Here

Venue: Senatssaal (E110)
Adress: LMU main building, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 Munich

Tuesday, 8th July

17.45–18.15
Welcome and Coffee

18.15–18.30
Conference Opening & Welcome
Vevian Zaki

18.30–19.30
Keynote/4MZ Lecture
Chair: Andreas Kaplony
Heleen Murre-van den Berg
Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies, Radboud University
Writing Travel: Ottoman Christian Mobility and the Production of Texts

Wednesday, 9th July

9.00–9.15 Welcome

Session 1: St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai
Chair: Zachary Chitwood

9.15–9.45
Denis Nosnitsin
Beta maṣāḥǝft Project, University of Hamburg
Ethiopians at St. Catherine’s: insights gained fromadditional notes in the monastery’s Ethiopic collection
The Ethiopic collection at Sinai has been known for many years, but it was recently revisited and surveyed again by researchers of the project
"Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea." This effort resulted in the re cataloging of all Ethiopic manuscripts and fragments. The collection provides first-hand evidence of Ethiopians who travelled to Sinai and stayed there. Five manuscripts from the pre-16th-century period yield around 45 additional notes. The presentation will focus on the results of the analysis of these notes and the information they contain, which can be helpful for reconstructing the historical profiles of at least ten mentioned Ethiopians. The notes range from excerpts of liturgical texts and common commemorative records to rare cases, such as a note recording historical events in Europe or reflecting the emotional condition of a writer suffering in an alien environment, far from his native land. 

9.45–10.15
Peter Tarras
Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, LMU Munich
Shopping Manuscripts for the Pope: Andreas Scandar and His Acquisitions for the Vatican Library
St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai is home to one of the world’s most important manuscript collections relating to the literary heritage especially of Eastern Christianity. Among the few other collections that can compete with it in this respect is that of the Vatican Library. In fact, there is a close link between the two collections, as the Vaticana also contains a whole series of manuscripts from Sinai. Many of these were only bought in the middle of the 20th century. However, some came to Europe already at the beginning of the 18th century. They were acquired by the Cypriot Maronite priest Andreas Scandar (d. 1748) during a three-year journey in the Ottoman Middle East. Scandar had been sent on a manuscript hunt by Pope Clement XI in 1718 specifically for the acquisition of Oriental manuscripts. The acquisition list was printed in 1721 by Joseph Simonius Assemani (d. 1768) in the second volume of his Biblioteca Orientalis. Scandar not only significantly enriched the Oriental holdings of the Vaticana, he was also one of the first modern manuscript hunters, long before Tischendorf, to bring manuscripts from the Sinai to Europe. The main aim of this contribution is to contextualise the provenance of the Sinaitic manuscripts in the Vatican. To this end, I will discuss Scandar's biography and the role of the Maronites as agents in the Ottoman Empire, his manuscript acquisition journey from 1718–1721 and the traces that he left behind in manuscripts. In particular, I will ask about Scandar’s acquisition practices, the way he selected manuscripts, and how he managed his travels at a time when the region was ravaged by the plague.

10.15–10.45
Vevian Zaki
Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, LMU Munich
Back and Forth to Mount Sinai: An Overview of Arabic-speaking Christian Travelers

10.45–11.15: Coffee Break

Session 2: Various Traces of Mobility
Chair: Björn Bentlage

11.15–11.45
Habib Ibrahim
University of Tübingen/ TYPARABIC Project, Bucharest
Traveling and Travel Challenges Across the Ottoman Empire: Examples from Mūsā Ṭrābulsī’s Correspondence (1732–1787)
This paper explores the complexities of travel and ecclesiastical diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire through the lens of Mūsā Ṭrābulsī’s correspondence, a unique Arabic source preserved in a manuscript held by the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate. Focusing on the long and tumultuous patriarchate of Sylvester of Antioch (1724–1766), it traces the continuous movements and negotiations of the patriarch and his secretaries, as they attempted to secure recognition, raise funds, and assert Orthodox authority in the face of growing Catholic influence. Appointed in Istanbul in 1724 but denied access to his patriarchal seat by the election of Cyril Ṭanās in Damascus, Sylvester spent decades traveling between Istanbul, Aleppo, Tripoli, and other cities, navigating court politics and relying on a diverse team of scribes, envoys, translators, and educators. Their correspondence offers a vivid portrait of the logistical, political, and confessional obstacles they encountered, from securing firmans and dealing with French diplomats to managing local unrest and imprisonment threats. This study emphasizes the centrality of travel—its risks, expenses, and strategic value—in the exercise of patriarchal authority and highlights the administrative sophistication of Sylvester’s entourage as revealed through newly edited letters from his chief Arabic secretary, Mūsā Ṭrābulsī.

11.45–12.15
Muzaffer Karaaslan
Institute for Near and Middle Eastern Studies, LMU Munich
Tracing Journeys: Travelers, Destinations, and Landmarks in Ottoman Wall Paintings
Ottoman wall paintings represent a significant art form reflecting the distinctive artistic sensibilities of each period. These decorations not only possess aesthetic value but also serve as historical documents of their respective eras. This paper examines a selection of wall paintings from various cities during the late Ottoman period. The analysis offers crucial insights into the world of travelers and the process through which popular landmarks were incorporated into the artistic repertoire of Ottoman painters.
In the late Ottoman period, many European travelers explored the East and conveyed their observations through travelogues. These accounts provided detailed insights into the cultural and social structures of the time and offered invaluable data on the architecture and panoramic landscapes of Eastern cities. The travelogues reached audiences both in Europe and the Ottoman world. The images contained in these works introduced popular cities and sites of the period, serving as important sources of inspiration for artists.
This study focuses on prominent cities and sites depicted in Ottoman wall paintings. For instance, views of Istanbul, Mecca, and Medina appear in many cities across the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Middle East. Ancient cities also attracted considerable interest from Ottoman artists and travelers; depictions of the Pyramids in a Gaziantep mansion and Karnak at Yıldız Palace exemplify this phenomenon. These images will be analyzed in relation to the travel routes and narratives of the period. This study also critically assesses how images disseminated through travelogues, newspapers, photographs, postcards, and ephemera inspired Ottoman artists.

12.15–12.45
Ashgan Metwaly
Faculty of Archeology, Ain Shams University
The impact of the Ottoman mobility on the provincial Egyptian cities: the Moroccans in Rosetta 18th century
In the eighteenth century, the commerce had flourished among the various ottoman regions, which entailed a prosperity of the east Mediterranean ports, including the Egyptian harbors: Alexandria, Damietta, and Rosetta. As a result, these ports attracted many ottomans non-Egyptian individuals and families to settle there. Alexandria, as the second city in Egypt, has been studied well, while the other provincial cities have not yet got the proper attention. This paper is an attempt to explore the impact of the trade prosperity in 18th century on Rosetta (a Mediterranean port in north Egypt) through tracing of many ethnic groups came to stay in Rosetta. Especially the Moroccans who represented the larger non-Egyptian community in Rosetta. Although, the main activity of Moroccans was trade, the archival documents showed that many of them had settled in Rosetta and owned houses for generations. One of the many influences of the Moroccan existence in the city was introducing many architectural elements in Rosetta buildings in the Eighteenth century. This paper tries to include the provincial cities in the historical narrative of Egypt and show the larger ottoman context in these local settlements.

12.45–14.00: Lunch Break

Session 3: Jerusalem
Chair: Ciprian Burlacioiu

14.00–14.30
Stephen J. Davis
Department of Religious Studies, Yale University
The Bibliographical Ties that Bind:The Movement of Monks and Manuscripts between Jerusalem and the Egyptian Monastery of the Syrians
The travel of bodies and books across the Near East during the Ottoman period had various vectors and was facilitated by multiple institutional contexts and practices. Among them, the cultural role of monasteries and monastic libraries looms large, including, most notably, the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai. In this paper, I focus on another prominent monastic library, the Egyptian Monastery of the Syrians (Dayr al-Suryān), drawing on my eleven-plus years of research cataloguing its corpus of Arabic Christian manuscripts. For the purposes of the conference, “Once, We Were Here,” I want to use the Dayr al-Suryān collection as a case study to explore evidence for biographical and bibliographical linkages between the monastery and the see of Jerusalem. Through a close examination of colophons, endowments, and readers’ notes (as well as patterns of textual transmission), I will seek to document how the Monastery of the Syrians (and, by extension, the wider Coptic Orthodox Church during this period) was marked by mobility and movement. The result, I hope, will contribute substantially to a material history of Dayr al-Suryān and its institutional intersections.

14.30–15.00
Carsten Walbiner
Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Christian Arabic descriptions of visits to Jerusalem (17th to 19th centuries)
The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was the most important religious journey undertaken by Arab Christians during the Ottoman period. Every year, when circumstances allowed, thousands of men and sometimes women travelled to the Holy City to visit the sites associated with Christian salvation history. While descriptions of such journeys are common in the "literatures" of most Christian "nations", they remained extremely rare among Arab Christians.
This paper presents three descriptions of visits to Jerusalem written between the 17th and 19th centuries. The Greek Orthodox priest Yūḥannā ʿUwaysāt who travelled from Damascus to Mount Sinai in 1635 also visited the Holy City. Ilyās al-Ghaḍbān, a prominent layman from Aleppo, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1755, and the Egyptian Armenian Catholic Naḫla Sāliḥ set out from Cairo in 1874 to visit the holy places in Palestine, including Jerusalem.
The analysis and comparison of these texts will show how the description of Jerusalem changed over time: from a sober depiction of the holy sites as the stage of biblical events to a description of a living city, sacred to more than one religion, and even to a critical discussion of the historicity of the monuments and traces venerated as authentic and holy.
A brief excursion will be made into the written information that Christian Arab travellers could rely on when preparing for their journeys and when on the spot, sources that also underwent a visible change from dry descriptions of the holy sites to modern, Western-style travel guides.

15.00–15.30
Ani Yenokyan
Matenadaran-Mesrop Mashtots Research Institute of Ancient Manuscripts
The Printing Response to Early Modern Armenian Pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the Sites of Jerusalem
In the Early Modern period, the number of pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Jerusalem significantly increased among believers of the Eastern Church, particularly Armenians, who showed remarkable enthusiasm. The geography of the Armenian pilgrimage was vast, encompassing primarily Armenian subjects of the Persian and Ottoman Empires. Most pilgrims comprised the urban population, with the most significant flow coming from the Armenian community in Constantinople. In this context, the paper will focus on the following points:
* How the Armenian Church, particularly the patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem, organized and institutionalized the growing demand among their believers to become mɑhtēsi/hajji (pilgrim). One of the earlier attempts occurred under the leadership of Patriarch Grigor Paron-Ter of Jerusalem (1613-1645) when pilgrimages to the Holy Land became organized events. The patriarch established way stations along pilgrimage routes and sent "summoners" to organize caravans from Armenian communities to Jerusalem.
* Within these factors, the demand for guidebooks increased, spreading such literature in printed and handwritten forms with illustrations of topographical views and buildings. Guidebooks were more than travel handbooks; they also functioned as pilgrimage mementos. With the initiative of Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, guidebooks were published in Constantinople—starting with Eremia Čelepi K̕yomowrčean’s first printed guide in 1678, followed by Hovhannes Hanna’s detailed guidebook, reprinted four times in the 18th century—and one example appeared from Italian printing, likely in Livorno (1700).

15.30–18.15: Free Time

18.15–19.30
Keynote 2
Chair: Ronny Vollandt
Boris Liebrenz
Bibliotheca Arabica | Project, Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Crossing Borders with Books: The Mobility of Libraries and Their Owners Through the Example of Abū Bakr al-Širwānī (d. 1135/1723)
Reading can seem to be a static practice, the armchair exploration of the world. But very often it is the context in which highly mobile objects and equally peripatetic people meet. The Ottoman administrator Abū Bakr al-Širwānī (d. 1135/1723) and his library are a prime example of bibliophile mobility. Being himself an immigration success story from the Safavid realm who made his way to the Ottoman capital via a tour through the empire, his books came to him along the way or met him often after having themselves traversed the width and breadth of the Islamicate world for centuries.
As vessels for the transport of texts, ideas, and esthetics, books also allow us to retrace their tremendous mobility more than most other objects. The stories they tell will be at the center of this talk.

Thursday, 10th July 2025

9.00–9.15
Welcome

Session 4: Manuscripts, Books, Notebooks
Chair: Alberto Tiburcio

9.15–9.45
Rawda el-Hajji
Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities/Hamburg University
Reconstructing Buda Manuscripts: The Case of Süleyman Efendi’s Multilayered Corpus
This presentation discusses the historical trajectories of the now-scattered holdings of the library of Süleyman Efendi, the preacher of the Great Mosque in Buda (present-day Budapest) during the 17th century under Ottoman rule. These manuscripts, dispersed across European libraries, are part of a corpus that originating from conquered Ottoman cities and fortresses. While specific manuscripts have been mentioned in literature, the library itself remains largely unexplored as a collection, lacking scrutiny until now.
When dealing with its provenance history, a library is not a monolith but an accumulation of historical activities and bibliographic decisions, involving various actors – scribes, librarians, collectors, and endowers – each with specific intentions and needs. This interplay of actors and their practices requires a multifaceted examination to understand the historical landscape within Ottoman Hungary.
In alignment with the conference's exploration of mobility and material traces, this research illuminates how manuscript trajectories reveal complex networks of cultural exchange and displacement. By examining these manuscripts as dynamic historical artefacts, the study demonstrates mobility beyond geographical movement, offering insights into the social, religious, and institutional networks that facilitated manuscript transmission during the Ottoman period.
Accordingly, the presentation will trace the manuscripts' trajectories through processes of translocation and displacement by combining provenance research with codicological analysis. By examining paratextual features and marginalia, it will uncover the layered histories of these manuscripts, revealing not only their physical movements but also the social networks and cultural exchanges that shaped their transmission and preservation.

9.45–10.15
Björn Bentlage
University of Bern/LMU Munich
A Trace of Life: The Notebook of a Syrian Merchant in 18th-Century Istanbul
Personal notebooks from the Early Modern Ottoman Empire are still exceedingly rare finds. The manuscript of an Arab tradesman and dabbler in poetry, known as the ʿAṭṭār al-Shāmī (alive 1765), is a rare chance to trace the life and mobility of a person outside of (but perhaps adjacent to) the elite circles who are usually front and center in the canonized literature of this period. What can we learn from the notebook, both as a physical object and as a (collection of) text(s), about the motivation for migrating from Syria to Istanbul, the reasons and ambitions behind his writing, and the details of a life that just happened to leave a trace that is still legible to us? The paper will offer observations in particular concerning the networks, strategies, and social differences that shaped and conditioned this concrete case of mobility and migration.

10.15–10.45
Ioana Feodorov
TYPARABIC Project, The Romanian Academy, Bucharest
Unexpected Journeys: Arabic Books in the Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest
I will discuss in my paper the origins of the collection of Arabic printed books in the Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest, which came into being as a result of the transfer of objects between the Middle East and Eastern Europe, namely, Romania, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The library has an important collection of manuscripts written in Arabic script, belonging to several Eastern cultures: Arabic, Persian, Ottoman (Turkish), and Uighur. From the same collections that were the source of these manuscripts came Arabic books that now form a small fund of particular interest and value. These books, scientifically studied for the first time by the TYPARABIC project funded by the European Research Council since 2021, include religious and philological texts printed in Wallachia (1701-1702, then 1747), Moldavia (1745-1746), Aleppo (1706, 1711), and the monastery of St. John the Baptist in Khinshara (Shuwayr), Mount Lebanon (1786). The few copies of these books arrived in Bucharest thanks to the special interest of Romanian diplomats and travelers, who did not read Arabic, but recognized the value of such rare items and wanted to enrich the collections of their home country. A special case is the exchange of books that took place when Cyril Karalevsky, also known as Cyrille Charon, while working for the Vatican Library, visited Bucharest and befriended the director of the library of the Romanian Academy in the first decades of the 20th century.

10.45–11.15
Octavian Negoita
TYPARABIC Project, The Romanian Academy, Bucharest
Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720) and the Circulation of Books from the East to the West
Even though the Jesuit-educated French theologian Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720) is one of the most renowned Orientalists of the early modern period, he is still an understudied figure. Apart from his Church career and works on theology, Renaudot was known for his Oriental interests regarding both Muslims and Eastern Christians, which brought him a membership in the Académie française, the Academy of Inscriptions, and the Accademia della Crusca of Florence, and led him to pen one of his most influential writings, that is the Historia Patriarcharum Alexandrinorum (Paris: Franciscum Fournier, 1713). Even if Renaudot did not travel himself to the East, he managed to acquire important Eastern Christian and Islamic manuscripts through his agents. In this paper I will discusses the circulation of "Oriental" books and manuscripts from the Ottoman Empire to Western Europe by looking at his collection hosted in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

11.15–11.45: Coffee Break

Session 5: Europe & the Ottoman Middle East
Chair: Teresa Bernheimer

11.45–12.15
Magdi Guirguis
Kafr Elsheikh University/Collegium de Lyon
Sarkis of Caffa: Journey from Caffa, via Jeddah to be executed in Cairo (17th century)
In June 1643 AD, an Armenian man called Sarkis al-kafawy (of Caffa: a coastal town and trade center on the Crimean Peninsula) was brought to the Islamic court in Cairo, Egypt, by an ottoman official who claimed that Sarkis had converted to Islam in Jeddah, and had given the name Ibrahim in Cairo, and then he renounced Islam and returned to his old religion, Christianity. When the judge asked Sarkis about this issue, he confessed clearly that he is a Christian and was enforced to convert to Islam. After long procedures he was at the end executed. Sarkis’s story tells us a lot of the commercial relation between the different regions of the Ottoman Empire; the Armenians in Crimean Peninsula, Jedda and Cairo; the martyrdom in that period: actual martyrdom or literary martyrdom. The only remain of this man is a legal document issued by a Muslim judge in Cairo. And this paper is an attempt to explore many aspects surrounding this story, including the legal language had been used in formulating this story.

12.15–12.45
Feras Krimsti
Gotha Research Library, University of Erfurt
Religious Pilgrimage in Early Modern Catholic Europe: The Alms-Collector Arsāniyūs Shukrī on the Materiality of the Sacred
Between 1748 and 1757, Arsāniyūs Shukrī (1707–1786), a member of the Lebanese Maronite Order in Mount Lebanon, travelled through France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. On his way, he wrote a travel journal that later served as the basis for an extensive travelogue. Arsāniyūs was one among an increasing number of Eastern Christians who, from the first half of the eighteenth century onwards, travelled to Western Europe asking for charity. His account is a veritable ethnography of pilgrimage to the early modern Catholic world. Besides urban daily life as well as court life and protocol, Arsāniyūs focused on the religious landscape through which he travelled, describing churches, convents, monasteries, and sites of veneration. He frequently highlighted material traces and remains thus contributing to a translocal Cult of the Saints. He sought contact with the bodily remains of famous saints, for example the “Precious Blood of Christ” relics in Fécamp in France. He also admired devotional images, described religious sculptures, paintings, manuscripts, and artifacts such as a jar used at the Wedding at Cana, which he saw in a monastery in Spain. In this paper, I argue that Arsāniyūs’ reflections on the materiality of the sacred were designed to draw Catholic Christians in Europe and in the Levant together through the establishment of a translocal form of piety in the aftermath of the Counter Reformation. These reflections on the materiality of the sacred encountered en route and described in the travelogue contributed towards Maronite identity formation.

12.45–13.15
Ahmed Attia Mourad
Faculty of Archeology, Fayoum University
The Architecture of the Frankish Quarter in Ottoman Cairo: The Interaction of Architectural Identity and Social Reality in the Ottoman Context
Ottoman Cairo attracted various ethnic groups from the East and the West, among whom was a significant number of Europeans who settled in Cairo or stayed there for varying periods of time. One of Cairo's neighborhoods even became known as the Frankish Quarter. This paper attempts to trace the traces of the Frankish presence in Cairo through documents and records of the Sharia courts in Cairo, which give us detailed descriptions of the neighborhood’s buildings, and its special architectural and artistic features, especially since this neighborhood included two churches for the Catholic community, and two other monasteries. The documents also refer to many Cairene’s properties were made as pious endowments for monasteries within and outside Egypt.
This paper seeks to study the interaction between architectural identity and social reality in historical cities with multiple cultures and identities in the Ottoman era, as a result of the opportunities and prospects for mobility and travel across the Ottoman Empire.

13.15–13.45
Johannes Stephan
Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies, Free University of Berlin
Construing Difference in Eighteenth Century Travel Narratives from Aleppo: On Texts Composed and Collected by Ḥannā Diyāb and Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb
My talk interrogates notions of difference as articulated in various travel narratives during the Ottoman period among Christian writers. More specifically, I examine the constructions of social difference and means to overcome them as well as the related literary devices that help characterize travel texts from Maronite households in Aleppo in the mid-eighteenth century. After briefly introducing some of the contexts, I focus in particular on the collections of Ḥannā b. Diyāb (d. after 1764) and Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb (d. 1775). Both read narratives of journeys, traveled themselves and authored and copied extensive travel narratives. These texts represent journeys to the contemporary centers of power, Rome, Istanbul, Madrid, Paris, but also to the peripheries – such as Ilyās al-Mawṣilī’s encounters with natural dangers in South America or Arsāniyūs b. Shukrī’s (Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb’s brother) lamentations about the terrible sleeping conditions in the villages of the Iberian Peninsula. While sharing a similar register of Arabic and themes of traveling, I shall argue, the travel narratives by Ilyās, Ḥannā b. Diyāb, Arsāniyūs, and Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb, each contain their own way of bridging difference and distance in narrative and socio-geographical terms. The varying notions of difference are both realized and dealt with through various framing techniques, including the interweaving of narrative voices and perspectives, addressing the readers and listeners or handling narrative time. Showcasing the literary dimension of constructing difference and its dominant patterns, my talk will present both these texts and my analysis as means to critique a popular approach to traveling as exhibiting “cultural encounters.

13.45–15.30: Final Lunch

15.30–17.00: Walking Tour

This conference is organized in the framework of the project “Travelers on the Margins: Mobility of Arabic-Speaking Christians in the Ottoman Empire” funded through the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Convenor: Vevian Zaki

Contact: v.zaki@lmu.de