Kadim Kütüphane
Primary sources of the Western esoteric tradition, in Turkish
Kadim Kütüphane (“the Ancient Library”) is an open digital library that brings the primary sources of the Western esoteric tradition into Turkish, most of them for the first time. It covers Hermetism and alchemy, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, astrology, Gnosticism, cosmology, sacred geometry and mystical theology, from late antiquity to the early modern period.
How every text is credited
Each page names the source edition, its year, the exact location of the translated passage within it, and links to the digitised scan it was made from. Most scans come from the Source Library (sourcelibrary.org). Others come from the Internet Archive, Gallica (BnF), the Wellcome Collection, the Bodleian Library, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Notes written by earlier translators or editors are marked as theirs, and page numbers of the edition are kept in the text, so that any sentence can be checked against the original.
Most of these works have never existed in Turkish, so this record is the reader’s only way to verify the translation. Passages that could not be read in the scan are marked as illegible rather than guessed.
How the translations are made
Most texts are translated into Turkish from the Source Library’s preliminary English translation, and each record states when a text was translated through English. Some texts are translated directly from the original Latin, Greek or Hebrew. Nothing is abridged or summarised. The full method is described on the method page (in Turkish).
Citation, DOIs and reuse
All translations are published under CC BY-SA 4.0. You may reuse and adapt them with attribution under the same licence. Every page has a ready citation (including BibTeX), and a growing number of works carry a DOI on Zenodo. Readers can report an error in any passage directly from the text.
Finding your way
Browse by author, by collection from the home page, or search the full text on the search page. A glossary explains recurring terms, and the translation status page shows which works are complete.
Contact
The library is edited and translated by Şira Nur Uysal. For collaboration, corrections or research use, write to [email protected].