did you know that there are Ottoman documents in provincial German archives? The number of Ottoman documents stored in the State Archive in Dresden, for instance, grew considerably from 1697 when Augustus II became king of Poland-Lithuania. Please RT

In the early 20th century no one was able to read them so the archive employees dispatched by post (!) some of those documents to Helmuth Scheel, a German Orientalist based in Berlin.

Scheel studied, among others, this document which confirms Jan Stadnicki, resident of Poland-Lithuania on his post in Istanbul. As this story indicates, in the early 20th century sometimes the archive came to the historians and not the other way around :)