The Hellmut Ritter memorial stone, situated above the German military cemetery in Tarabya. Created in 1986 by Bern Pielemeier at the initiative of Traugott Fuchs. Today, the once open view of the Bosphorus has become overgrown (as the stone itself will be overgrown soon).

I always wondered how the Ottoman budget for the year 1904-5 found it's way to the Leiden Special collection. Turns out it might be from the library of Sultan Murad V. "formally bought by Cense [former head of the NIT Istanbul] personally to avoid problems with Turkish customs authorities" in 1962:

Hier noch eine gute Anekdote zu den inventories aus einer Essaysammlung von Witkam

And the twentieth century adds some additional interesting layers (Witkam, Inventory vol. 15, 95):

Another wonderful book by Kreiser is his introduction to Istanbul based on Ottoman sources:

Still a very nice introduction to get a sense of what has been done in languages other than english before 2000:

My word autocorrection on the state of German Ottoman scholarship:

Jan Schmidt on his work as a cataloguer of the Turkish manuscripts at John Rylands University Library, Manchester:

Weekend inspiration from the Robert Anhegger (1911-2001) archive, Leiden University Library, Cod. Or. 26.621 (13)

Without knowing the dimensions of the stamp, it would have been impossible to identify the following two stamps (Ms. AP Ar. 177 and Ms. AP Ar. 258). In addition, Said Aljoumani was able to find both book titles in the al-Jazzār library inventory.

It was a little more difficult to identify the same stamp here (Ms. AP Ar. 410):

Much less is known about the AP manuscripts that were digitized in 2022. While identifying ownership statements in the manuscripts, I found al-Jazzār’s stamp in 5 mss. Two of the stamps are quite clearly visible (Ms. AP Ar. 261 and Ms. AP Ar. 290):