News From Ministry

MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS DIPLOMATIC ARCHIVES

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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey is carrying out its most comprehensive archive project in the history of the Republic. Around 65 million pages are being digitized, indexed and declassified. Diplomatic documents that are of crucial importance for better understanding and truthfully recording of the history of Turkey’s foreign policy, are becoming accessible after years of meticulous work. The copies of diplomatic documents are becoming digitally available to researchers through the “BETSIS Documents Search” System of the Turkish State Archives as an easy and rapidly accessible site. The Turkish Diplomatic Archives (TDA) includes treaties and documents dated between 1919-2001 in Turkish, English, French and other languages, including 500 thousand pages in Ottoman Turkish. The TDA will provide precious content for researchers and will be an essential and valuable first-hand resource for the academia. Turkey is represented at the ICEDD International Conferences of Editors of Diplomatic Documents. Delegations from other institutions and archive departments of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs visit Turkish diplomatic archives to benefit from our experience. MoUs on cooperation in the field of Diplomatic Archives were signed with 19 countries. The website of the Turkish Diplomatic Archives TDA diad.mfa.gov.tr is in service as of August 2019. Researchers are able to connect to the “BETSIS Documents Search” system through the TDA website. Former publications of the MFA as well as new volumes of the TDA are becoming available as e-publications at the TDA website.