In Ottoman lands, waqfs were established to meet numerous social, cultural, and economic needs. It is known that many public services in areas such as education, health, and culture that exist today were carried out by waqfs during the Ottoman period. One of the most distinctive institutions established by the Ottomans was the Cash Waqf (Para/Nukut Vakfı). These institutions are seen to have emerged predominantly in the Ottoman Rumelia region. Although cash waqfs were initially founded to meet religious, cultural, and social needs, it is understood that, over time, they also came to perform an important function in the economic and financial sphere in addition to these needs.
The project primarily aims to transcribe, from Ottoman Turkish into modern Turkish, the documents of approximately 1,000-1,500 cash waqfs out of the 3,000-4,000 waqf deeds located, during the Ottoman period, within the Rumelia region excluding Istanbul – covering the present-day territories of Thrace, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Romania, Montenegro, and Hungary. Following this transcription, analyses will be conducted, based on the documents, of the role of cash waqfs in the social, cultural, and religious life of this region as well as their functions and institutional development in the fields of finance and economics, with the aim of clarifying the effects of these institutions from the Ottoman period to the present.
This study aims to examine Ottoman cash waqfs, considered to be of great economic importance, and to reveal their effects. The main objective of the project is the identification, reading, transcription, and publication of records belonging to cash waqfs in the Rumelia region, and the evaluation of the results. Through the identification and publication of these records, revealing the role of cash waqfs as a financial instrument in economic and social life is a key priority.
Within the scope of the project, the legacy of cash waqfs will be uncovered, and the reflections of these institutions both in the period in which they were established and today can be analyzed in light of the findings. The thesis that cash waqfs in Ottoman Rumelia, while meeting social service needs on one hand, also relieved the market by providing credit in times of market tightness on the other, will be tested. The scale of the financial structures of cash waqfs within their period can be determined in terms of present-day currency, allowing meaningful results to be obtained. In periods when the economy contracted and stagnated, these institutions had a market-relieving effect by providing credit to the market. However, this claim has only been stated and has not been analyzed and precisely calculated in terms of its economic effect on the market. One of the aims of this project is to discuss, and to the extent possible measure and analyze, the effect of cash waqfs on the market during periods of economic fluctuation (business cycles). Related to this, another aim of the project is to analyze the effect on the market and the economy of the changing profit rates of waqfs during certain (exceptional-extraordinary) periods.