KONGRE BİLDİRİLERİ
The entry “Tapu” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, written by Suraiya Faroqhi, is rightly introduced
as “a term of Ottoman fiscal administration”.2 However, the focus of its activities was the registration
of estates, of land. This concept and system emerged in order to guarantee the relationship between
lender and borrower: this was the most reliable technique whereby a piece of property could be
registered as mortgaged, thus providing a security for the repayment of a loan, hence in case of default
claimed by the creditor, no allegation of a prior mortgage would be counted. Beyond and above
this basic conceptual approach, this legal term was also systematically used in the fiscal field, as an
important tool for the collection of taxes. In the Ottoman empire, roughly from the XVIth century
onwards, the word applied to the holding of state-owned lands (miri), which were granted to subjects
of the sultan to whom they were leased in perpetuity as long as they cultivated them. The Land Code
of 1858, as part of the centralization policy of the Tanzimat reforms, introduced a cadastral system.
The newly established office of tahrir-i emlak nezareti started issuing formal documents to every
property owner, whereby cultivators’ tenure of the land was recognized as permanent, first in the
provinces located close to Istanbul, then stretching gradually to encompass the entire empire.
Gershon Gera collection, Photo Archives, Yad Izhak Ben-zvi)
Some of my Arab students can still report that their grandparents used at home quite a variety
of Turkish words (“birinji”, pronounced “brinji”), hence they are familiar with their exact meaning,
though the younger generation will seldom use these in contemporary colloquial Arabic. In Hebrew
daily speech, too, one can think of a few left-overs, which are used