_ 254 _ were of considerable importance, both intrinsically and as specimens of the treasures still untouched. At the same time a start was made on the vital task of preserving and cataloguing the records. The war and post-war periods and the change of regime and capital brought a change for the worse, and a period of neglect culminated in the sale of 200 bales of finance records to a Bulgarian paper mill as waste paper. As a result of the ensuing scandal some of the material was recovered and, perhaps more important, the Turkish government began to take the problem of the archives seriously in hand. Since then, astonishing progress has been made. Many of the scattered depots in different old buildings in Istanbul have been assembled in central collections in fine new buildings, with proper care for their preservation and maintenance, and a good start made on their classification and cataloguing.(A) Although it will inevitably be many years before the work is completed it has already gone far enough to permit the exploitation of whole classes of material, and one catalogue, that of the (A) In 1936-7 Professor L. Fekete, of Budapest, was invited by the Turkish authorities to advise them on the new classification of the archives. See [L. Fekete] Arsiv Meseleleri. Translated from Hungarian into Turkish by Tayyip Gökbilgin, Istanbul, 1939.
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