The rich archive, put together by well-known researcher, author, folklorist and poet, Taha Toros, also known as "Archive Man," throughout his life, will be at Istanbul Şehir University with the support of the Istanbul Development Agency (İSTKA). Within the scope of the project "Istanbul Memory in Personal Archives," thousands of photographs, paintings, personal notes, letters, postcards and documents, which were collected by Toros since his childhood, will be unveiled. Moreover, books in the Ottoman language and Turkish within the project will cast light on the different eras of Istanbul. Following the research on people, institutions and incidents related to Istanbul through 20,000 documents, more than 400,000 documents at Istanbul Şehir University's library will be digitized and made available to researchers online.
Taha Toros's archive, which is expected to make a huge contribution to Istanbul's cultural heritage, features biographic files of many artists, politicians and men of letters such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the sultans of the Ottoman Empire, Tahya Kemal, Nazım Hikmet, Orhan Kemal, Yaşar Kemal, Fikret Mualla and Bedia Muhavvit. Some files in the archive, which are related to cinema, painting, music, handcrafts and Turkish War of Independence, stand out among others. Toros's archive is an important source for foreign and Turkish academics, researchers as well as students of art and history.
