Portrait And Self-Portrait: Ibrahim Müteferrika’s Mind Games

Abstract

The current paper will deal with an intellectual who became famous in Ottoman cultural history as the founder of the first Ottoman-Turkish printing house (1726). He was a Hungarian-born Protestant (allegedly Unitarian), who left his homeland Transylvania in the late 17th century, took refuge in the Ottoman Empire and converted to Islam, gaining a new Ottoman and Muslim identity under the name Ibrahim Müteferrika. I intend to reveal Müteferrika’s portrait and self-portrait by dwelling not only on the few available narratives dealing with it, but also on those aspects of Müteferrika’s post-Transylvanian activities in which one could see some important idiosyncrasies of his pre-Ottoman identity.