Among the Turkish manuscripts in the collection of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies is a late eighteenth-century copy of a mathnawī poem written by the Turkish poet Süleymān Çelebī (Sulaymān Chalabī; 1351—1410) and known by the title Mawlid-i Nabī. The manuscript has a leather binding with a gold imprint in the centre — a medallion with floral ornamentation — and a border of small rosettes (on the outer side of the binding) with a fully gilded impressed drawing on the inner side. The dimensions of the folios are: 21.0X16.4 cm. The text occupies a space of 14.0 X 10.0 cm and is copied in black Indian ink in two columns framed by a gold border. The text is vocalised and each page contains 11 bayts. In all, the copy contains 1,204 lines of poetry. The manuscript was acquired in 1962 from relatives of the collector and Orientalist S. M. Shapshal...