In a small, eastern German city, a treasure trove of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian manuscripts invites visitors to explore the longstanding and ongoing connections between Europe and the Middle East.
You could walk by every day and not know it was there.
That is, if you could ignore a sprawling, white-walled palace perched high upon a hill, overlooking the town of Gotha’s bucolic environs in central Germany.
Known as Friedenstein Palace, it is one of the best-preserved examples of early Baroque European architecture. Established in the mid 17th-century by Duke Ernst I (1601-1675) of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the building survived World War II and the Cold War, but the signs of its age are showing. With orange stains dripping from its windows, rotting support beams in its vaulted roofs, scaffolding clinging to columns in the courtyard, and the detritus of renovation strewn about its gardens, Friedenstein might look like a palace long past its former glory. But inside are resplendent rooms reflective of the riches of a dukedom at the height of its power and, in the east wing, a world-famous collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts and artifacts.
PHOTO courtesy AramcoWorld/Fabian Brennecke.
Altogether, the Gotha Research Library holds about 1 million objects, including nearly 362,000 books, manuscripts, and print materials. Among them are 800 years of Islamicate scholarship, comprised of 3,500 manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. This “Oriental Collection” — featuring reams of legal, literary, grammatical, philosophical, geographic, theological, and other texts — sits side-by-side on the floor-to-ceiling shelves with paragons from the history of Europe, including a UNESCO World Heritage first print copy of the German Protestant Reformer Martin Luther’s "On the Freedom of a Christian,” published in 1520.
Each book and every manuscript has a story: from a famous hadith collection possibly pulled out from under a murdered mufti’s corpse during the siege of Buda in 1684 to an account of the life and exploits of Alexander the Great in Turkish, featuring a richly colored depiction of the Greek king’s mythical “flying machine” — a set of gryphons chained to a throne with rods of meat above. As they traveled, these texts survived numerous, disruptive epochs in European and Middle Eastern history — including two world wars, the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Today, scholars across the globe travel to Gotha to explore its almost encyclopedic collection of treasured documents.
The library’s history tells a tale of scientific adventure and of a contemporary renaissance in the study of Middle Eastern manuscripts. More than that, it reveals how such a significant treasury made it to a somewhat forgotten, small city in the former East German Republic.
*Corrections: the lead image on the website is of the Herzogliches Museum of Gotha, not the Palace with the library. Also, Kathrin Paasch did not become director until after the tenure of its previous director, Rupert Schaab, ended in 2005.