Exhibition Turcksche boucken

Turcksche boucken. The Oriental Collection of Levinus Warner, Dutch diplomat in Istanbul is a collaboration project between Leiden University and Museum Meermanno to mark 400 years of relations between the Netherlands and Turkey. This is the first time for a great many years that a magnificent collection of Oriental manuscripts is on display to the public. The manuscripts were collected by Levinus Warner (c. 1618−1665), the Dutch Republic’s ambassador in Istanbul, in the mid-seventeenth-century.

In Turcksche boucken (‘Turkish Books’), Museum Meermanno follows Warner’s career as a book collector, from his student days in Leiden until his untimely death in Istanbul in 1665. This diplomat was assigned to represent Dutch interests at the court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1655. Fascinated by the languages and cultures of the Middle East, he built up an enormous collection of manuscripts, bequeathing it on his death to the University of Leiden, where he had studied Oriental languages.

These manuscripts are seldom exhibited. The exhibition also gives a picture of Warner’s life as a diplomat and shows how Westerners viewed Istanbul in that period, with the aid of original documents and ‘Oriental’ illustrations by engravers such as Jan Luyken. Visitors can thus gain a very lively picture of the intellectual and diplomatic climate in Istanbul in the seventeenth century, and see how relations between the Dutch Republic and Turkey developed in that period.