Elif Sezer-Aydınlı is a cultural historian specializing in the Ottoman history of books and reading culture. Her studies focus on the reading, writing, and listening practices of Ottoman individuals based on their first-hand notes on manuscripts of popular heroic stories. She received her PhD degree from Freie Universität Berlin in 2022 with the dissertation “Manuscript Community in Ottoman Istanbul (18th-19th Centuries): Heroic Stories, Social Profiles and Reading Space.” Her dissertation project was generously supported by the American Institute in Turkey (ARIT) during the 2019–2020 academic year as a visiting scholar at Boston College in the US. In 2023, her dissertation received the J.P.Gumbert Award given by the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Hamburg University. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in 2023-2024. Dr. Sezer-Aydınlı is currently a lecturer at Sabancı University at the Foundations Development Program (FDD). Her publications include a book The Oral and The Written in Ottoman Literature: The Reader Notes on the Story of Firuzşah (Libra, 2015), an article “’Unusual Readers in Early Modern Istanbul: Manuscript Notes of Janssaries and Other Riff- Raff on Popular Heroic Narratives” (Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 2018), and other peerreviewed articles on the collective authorship, books turned into sound, and transformation of mecmua authorship in Ottoman manuscript culture.

“In one of our long email chains with Tarık Tüten, I wrote: ‘I began to think that Hafız Ahmed Agha’s soul somehow finds me.’ After my very late realization, I suspected that the places I frequently visit that are very close to my home, such as the mosque in Karacaahmet built by him or the Fethi Pasha Grove, once belonged to his son. Now I am writing an article about the inventory that was so close to his heart that he prayed not to miss a page in the future; God forbid (ma’āzallāhü ta’ālā)! Therefore, it is a privilege and a debt to be part of this Conversation, which is, among other things, a reverence for his donations, starting with the beautiful library he built in Rhodes. I would like to thank the people who made this possible, especially Tarık Tüten, who was always on hand to answer my questions and provide the necessary documents and corrections at every stage of this article. His friendship is one of the indirect ‘endowments’ of Hafız Ahmed Agha to my life. My dear professor İsmail Erünsal also contributed to this study with his ‘field-constituting’ research on Ottoman libraries and catalogs, and also with our ‘conversations’ in another library, İSAM.”

Elif Sezer-Aydınlı