Müteferrika in Iran

Ibrahim Müteferrika, the first Turkish printer, of Hungarian origin, having visited the Protestant universities of Western Europe, then moved from Transylvanian Kolozsvár (Cluj) to Constantinople, later working as an interpreter all over the Balkans and as a diplomat at the end of his life in the Caucasus, traveled over such a vast area as few others in his time. He had a detailed knowledge of the Persian empire as well, at least this is indicated by his first printed work (1529), the following map of Persia. But whether he personally was in Persia is unknown to us, and considering the diplomatic relations between the two empires in the period, it is more probable that he was not.


Müteferrika arrived at Iran only on 15 Âbân 1390, or as the infidels say, 6 November 2011, the day before yesterday, shortly after noon. We received the news from the Hungarian Iranologist Miklós Sárközi researching in Tehran that even two distinguished Persian academic sites gave information on the first academic Müteferrika site composed by us where, apart from the biography and bibliography of the scholar, we also gradually publish the electronic facsimile of all the Turkish incunables published by him. The text of the two news is the same. Besides the English translation we also quote the Persian original, hoping that it would invite some stray Persian readers to our site.




The Persian text transcribes Müteferrika’s name with the MTFRQh consonants, whose authentic pronunciation by a Persian reader is unknown to us. We have rendered it as above on the basis of the common word “motafaregh”, ʻscattered’, written with the same consonants except for the final h. And although the scholarly reviewer was also somewhat scattered – it seems that he did not arrive in the menu down at Imre Karácson’s name, who searched the traces of Müteferrika before anyone else in the archives of fin-de-siècle Istanbul, he does not mention the biography in Turkish, and he unambiguously points out captivity as the reason of Müteferrika’s stay in Istanbul, ignoring the new and more probable possibilities proposed in our biography –, nevertheless it is a great achievement that the Transylvanian Hungarian printer reached for the first time the world of Persian scholarship.