Istanbul’s Earliest Panorama Pic in Digital Collection

Two new items from the former Corvina Library of Hungary’s King Matthias and the earliest panoramic photograph of Istanbul, consisting of ten images, have been made available to the public in the digital collection of the National Széchényi Library (OSZK).

The inclusion of the new items was announced at a press event, which was part of Hungarian-Turkish Cultural Year organized to mark the 100th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Hungary and Turkey in 1923. "The centenary program is an opportunity to celebrate Hungarian and Turkish culture together, as two wonderful groups of documents, the corvinae in Istanbul and the 19th century city photographs in our library's collection, have become freely available online for everyone to download, research and enjoy," Dávid Rózsa, Director General of the National Széchényi Library said.

According to C. Gülsen Karanis Eksioglu, Turkey's Ambassador in Budapest, the digital treasures on display are of great importance for Turkish-Hungarian relations and the history of the two countries. Speaking about the historical photographic rarity, he expressed his special thanks to the OSCE for "bringing down these great photographs from the dusty shelves of history and presenting them to us."

The Corvina Library of Mátyás Hunyadi Hunyadi was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2006. The approximately 220 surviving corvinae of the former library are in fifty collections in libraries in Europe and the United States, and their processing and collection began twenty years ago. Fifty-five corvinae are held in five public collections in Hungary, thirty-six of which are in the National Széchényi Library. In 2020, the Bibliotheca Corvina Virtualis online service was launched, which aims to present the surviving and identified volumes of the Bibliotheca Corvina, the library of Matthias' reign.   

The press conference included the presentation of a photographic curiosity from the library's photo collection, a curio of Istanbul's history, taken in 1869 from the Galata Tower. The pictures were found during the digitization of an album of Baron Ferenc Révay. The 11 albums, containing around 800 images taken by professional photographers, record Ferenc Révay's travels in the Eastern Mediterranean in the years around the Reconquest. The pictures give an insight into the architecture of Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, Istanbul, Mecca and Medina, and the typical world of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but two albums also include pictures of members of the Révay family and of castles in the Highlands.

The 1,869 leather-bound, copper-backed volume, initialed Ferenc Révay, contains a total of 41 photographs of Istanbul from the series by the photographer Pascal Sébah. The 10 views, juxtaposed to form a panorama of almost 300 degrees, are unlike any other known online images. Researchers say the series is the earliest panoramic image of the city to have survived in its entirety.