Hardware support from TİKA to the State Archives of North Macedonia

Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TİKA) carried out a project for the repair, refurbishment, and technical hardware installation of the Ottoman Archive unit of North Macedonia’s State Archives. TİKA organized a ceremony upon the completion of the project. 

Within the scope of the project, the following items were provided to the State Archives of North Macedonia: central storage device for institutional archive data, external discs, laptops, desktop computers, professional and microfilm scanners, of which North Macedonia had only one in its public institutions, worktables, book scanners and plotter printers.  TİKA’s Vice President, Mahmut Çevik, Director of North Macedonia State Archives, Emil Krsteski, TİKA employees, representatives of Turkish institutions in the country and other guests participated in the ceremony.  

“We will shed light on the future”

TİKA’s Vice President, Mahmut Çevik made a statement to press members and said that Ottoman Empire remained in this geography for about 500 years and developed a certain lifestyle in the region. He informed that since then more than 16 thousand tangible and intangible cultural products have been made.   Saying that the two countries hold onto their shared history, Çevik added, “We have undertaken the repair and refurbishment of the Ottoman archive, which is a first, and increased its capacity. Thus, from now on, we will shed light on the future”.  

Çevik stated that they have been working for the last 18 years to unravel the Ottoman archives, documents, and registries, transfer them to future generations and present them to the researchers. He emphasized that with this unit, they will work more actively on the archives.

Çevik said that they conducted the project in three stages and detailed:

"At stage one, we try to understand which institutions do the job and how. Then, Turkish experts come to the country where we will be conducting project and they determine the working areas and action plans by discussing the relevant persons. Next, we detect the required equipment, hardware and devices, both for reading and inventory purposes. After that, we take pictures to track the inventory. Above all, we take measures to protect these archives and transfer them to next generations, so we digitalize the images. I guess we have had over 150 thousand images so far. More than 30-40 thousand documents have been examined in North Macedonia."

Krsteski, the Director of North Macedonia State Archives, said he had promised to open a unit for Ottoman Archives when he was assigned as the Director of the State Archives.