The 19th century saw several rediscoveries of older manuscripts and their publication in printed form. In 1834 the Austrian scholar Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall discovered the surviving manuscript of Evliya Çelebi’s 17th-century travelogue; he translated it into English and published it with the assistance of the Royal Asiatic Society. In the expanded public sphere of the 1860s, many Ottoman chronicles hitherto only available in manuscript form were printed and distributed for the first time. These included histories by chroniclers like Raşid (1865), Hoca Sad’eddin (Tac-üt Tevarih, 1862 and 1863-64) and Katib Çelebi (Fezleke, 1869-70). Naima’s 6-volume history, originally printed by İbrahim Müteferrika in 1733, was republished twice (1863-64 and 1864-66), while Peçevi’s 2-volume history was published in 1864. The reception of these works was instrumental in forging new historical attitudes in the late Ottoman Empire. Naima (1655–1716), who wrote about the Ottoman-Austrian skirmishes in the 17th century, was widely regarded as the most authoritative Ottoman chronicler. İbrahim Peçevi (1572–1650), born in what is today Hungary, served in military posts on the Habsburg frontier. The influence of these chronicles is seen especially in Namık Kemal’s writings, which at times charted Ottoman history from Istanbul, and elsewhere depicted the heroism of lower-ranking Ottomans on the frontier.

A series of works were rediscovered in the early 20th century in tandem with the growth of interest in Turkism. The 11th-century “Compendium of the lexicon of Turkish” (Divan-ı Lugat-ı Türk) doubled as an ethnography of Turks; a manuscript was discovered by Ali Emiri Efendi at a second-hand bookshop in 1914. It was published in a 3-volume edition by Kilisli Rifat in 1915-17 with the encouragement of Ziya Gökalp and the Young Turk leader Talat Pasha. Following abortive attempts to publish a version of the book in contemporary Turkish in the 1920s, the manuscript was eventually translated by Besim Atalay and published by the Turkish Linguistic Society in 1939-41. A manuscript of “The wisdom providing happiness” (Kutadgu Bilig), an Uighur-language “mirror for princes” also from the 11th century, was discovered in 1823 by Von Hammer-Purgstall in Istanbul and taken to the imperial library in Vienna. The work was partially published in 1870 by the Turanian theorist Vámbéry in Innsbruck, alongside a Roman transliteration and a German translation. It was published in full with an introduction by Wilhelm Radloff in 1891. In the Republican era, the work was translated into Modern Turkish and published in 1947. Both Divan-ı Lugat-ı Türk and Kutadgu Bilig are regarded as the two earliest extant works of Turco-Islamic literature. The publication of the Dede Korkut epic during this period also elicited great interest: discovered by Orientalist scholars in Dresden in the early 19th century, it was translated into Russian by Vilhelm Bartold in 1894, and later published in the Ottoman Empire by Kilisli Rifat in 1916, and again by Orhan Şaik Gökyay in 1938.